


There's This Tune I've Found (That Makes Me Think of You Somehow)

by WakeUpDreaming



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers Family, Blow Jobs, Dissociation, First Time, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, M/M, Past Bucky Barnes/Natasha Romanov, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Recovery, Referenced Kidnapping, Side Sam Wilson/Natasha Romanov, Sink breaking, Strippers & Strip Clubs, Undercover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-03
Updated: 2014-07-04
Packaged: 2018-02-07 06:04:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 27,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1887702
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WakeUpDreaming/pseuds/WakeUpDreaming
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve, Bucky, and Sam are brought in to aid Natasha on a mission where she can’t get close enough to the mark to get any intel, but it's not for the normal reasons. It feels more personal this time, especially for Bucky. Somebody’s kidnapping women and bringing them to Hydra facilities, brainwashing them to make sleeper agents and sending them back out into the world. The only problem? The location is a strip club. Steve, Sam, and Bucky have to go undercover as strippers, only for Steve and Bucky to realize that there are some things going on that don't just have to do with watching each other onstage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Step 1: Integrate

**Author's Note:**

> Wow! It's been one hell of a ride with this fic. Arctic Monkeys, the Donnas, Anya Mariana, the Cab, and Marianas Trench are fully to blame/thank for me finally getting this fic done, because most of it was written to their lyrics. A disclaimer: I have never been to a strip club nor have I had supersoldier serum, been a stripper, or used a shield. I apologize if some facts or details are inaccurate.  
> Title from Arctic Monkey's Do I Wanna Know?, as that song basically created this fic. It's going to be 3 chapters, so I hope you enjoy!

It all starts on a Sunday morning in the middle of Steve’s living room, a book propped on his chest where it fell when he conked out. Superheroes still need sleep. You know, sometimes.

The phone ringing from Bucky’s room wakes Steve slowly, the ringing integrating itself into the dream about the Iron Man suit suing for autonomy as an incessant beeping.

“Shut it off, Tony,” he grumbles, swiping at the air. “Make it stop.”

There’s some stumbling and something that’s spoken harshly in Russian until he hears Bucky’s voice say, “What is it now, Coulson?”

It’s silence for a few moments, which gives Steve a moment to stretch his neck out, pulling his arms above his head and hearing a couple of cracks in his joints. By the time he manages to sit all the way up, still a little sleep blurred, Bucky’s standing in front of the couch with a look on his face like he’s not sure what to say next.

“Bucky?” Steve asks, quirking an eyebrow. He laughs as Bucky blinks.

“Sorry, just your shirt’s, uh…” Bucky gestures vaguely at Steve, who manages to understand the motion as “fix yourself.” And Bucky’s right – Steve’s shirt looks like it’s migrating north for the winter, and Steve tries to contain his blush. Bucky’s response is to bite his lip, half smiling.

“Right. Sorry. What was the phone call about?” Steve does his best to quell what he assumes must be discomfort on Bucky’s face.

Bucky runs his hands through his hair. It’s still long and shaggy, but Steve kinds of likes it the way it is. That’s about the time that he realizes he’s staring and stops immediately. “Natasha’s mission, you know. She’s in it totally undercover, but she can’t do much more. The target’s been completely dismissive of her attempts to get closer. The target won’t open up to her.” Bucky frowns. “The one at the club. Where she’s a desk attendant. Or something.”

“Alright,” says Steve, not quite understanding. Bucky’s got a tendency to talk in circles now, as if he’s trying to organize his thoughts through hearing them. The trick is to let him go, let him keep going until he reached here he was, and guide him if he seemed lost. “And?”

“Well,” says Bucky, slowly, “At this point, she’s got word of a human trafficking thing going on. Wants you, me and Sam on it.”

Steve frowns. “Oh what planet does that have anything to do with us?”

Bucky looks up and meets Steve’s eyes, looking concerned. “They’re Hydra, Steve. Kidnapping women who come to this club or whatever when they’re a little drunker than they meant to be, and – well, and brainwashing them.” At the last few words, Bucky’s eyes shut and his fists clench at his side. Steve, like always, stands and rests a hand somewhere on Bucky, this time on Bucky’s shoulder, a pressure just reassuring enough to let Bucky know that he’s here and not back in that chair with Pierce looming over him. They wait for a few moments for Bucky to get back to himself.

“I’m okay,” Bucky says, chancing a half smile. “Look, I wanna be on this one, okay? If there’s a chance I can keep someone else from being some other mindless minion for Hydra, that’s more I can make up for back when I was a –”

“You don’t have to make up for anything,” says Steve firmly. The conversation is almost mechanical at this point, Bucky convinced he needs to atone for sins he committed when he wasn’t his own, Steve defending him, Bucky sighing like Steve doesn’t get it.

And, really? Maybe Steve doesn’t. But he knows Bucky and knows he’ll do whatever Bucky needs to help him out.

“Yeah, yeah,” says Bucky, with another smile. “You in, though?”

“Sure,” says Steve, “always up for taking down Hydra.” He looks down and realizes his hand is still on Bucky’s shoulder, and it had (of its own accord, not Steve’s, definitely not Steve’s) moved to cup Bucky’s neck. Steve coughs and moves that hand to scratch the back of his neck, hoping he’s not glowing red like a restaurant sign.

“Let’s get to SHIELD for the pre-mission rant from Coulson, yeah?” says Bucky, bopping Steve gently on the jaw, open palmed so it almost feels more like a caress.

Steve very, very carefully thinks of Fury licking a hot dog and any other emotions are immediately quelled. “Let me guess,” he says, making his voice light as possible, “Forty minute briefing that could have been outlined by Natasha in thirty seconds?”

“Ten bucks says Coulson avoids saying the words ‘strip club’ during the debriefing,” Bucky laughs.

For a moment Steve doesn’t catch on. Then his jaw drops. “Wait a second,” he says. “Are we going to be – ”

“Maybe,” says Bucky with a shrug. “I’ve stopped pretending that I can predict what happens in this line of work.”

They head to headquarters.

* * *

“You want us to go undercover as WHAT now?!” hollers Sam. Steve would call it a shriek and perhaps chuckle at his reaction, if he weren’t so nervous about Sam’s tendencies to give him “get your head out of your ass” rants. Steve’s dealt with a lot of those rants over past two years. He’s not up for another one any time soon.

“If you have a problem with the mission,” says Coulson coolly, “we can send someone else. The three of you were chosen because you’ve got the most skill with people of those available and don’t have any overarching, um, issues.”

“Issues?” Bucky asks.

Coulson sighs. “You’re the best Avengers with the whole humanity thing and all.”

“Literally twenty-five percent of my limbs are metal,” says Bucky dully. “One quarter of my appendages are a weapon. One out of four of my –”

“We get it, Agent Barnes,” says Coulson. He doesn’t even hide his eye roll, but Agent Hill’s in the corner looking like she’s fighting off a smile. “Stark’s got the social skills of a feral cat in heat, Thor’s a literal alien god, and Clint was raised by carnies. You really want me to call the three of them in?”

“Well,” says Steve, “raised by carnies isn’t the worst –”

“Okay, fine,” sighs Coulson. “We asked him to come in, and he literally laughed in my face when I told him about this.

“You mean we weren’t all your first choice?” says Steve, because, yeah, he’s a little hurt.

“Believe me,” says Coulson, “if we had a better choice than two nonagenarians with practically puritan values, we’d go for it. But you guys have the physicality and necessary…” Coulson interrupts himself with a couch as he pointedly keeps his eyes on Steve’s. “Necessary appearance.”

“Does that mean Sam was always your first choice?” asks Bucky. “Because I totally should have trumped Tweety Bird, metal arm or not.”

“Watch yourself, XJ9.”

Everyone in the room just looks at Sam, who rolls his eyes. “None of you people even went near Nickelodeon, did you? Damned shame.”

Steve’s still not used to how easily Sam and Bucky bounce off of each other, but he’s realized slowly that Bucky’s developing his knowledge of cultural references (is Tweety Bird that rooster? He’ll have to figure it out, he can’t remember) way faster than Steve was.

“Back to the mission,” says Coulson, “you’re going undercover in a,” he clears his throat, “ladies club. A club for ladies. With male,” he pointedly avoids anybody’s eyes, face, body, anything, “dancers.”

“I can’t believe we’re going to be strippers,” says Bucky, looking a little disheveled. “What, do we need to pick parts or something? Are we just, like, in?” He frowns. “This isn’t one of those places where we dress up as babies or animals or old people, right? Because I don’t care what other people do, but I would definitely not be comfortable with that.”

Coulson avoids answering that last part of Sam’s question. “You need to audition first.”

At this point, Steve just slides his head into his hands and sighs deeply. “My mama is probably rolling over in her grave right now,” he says, his voice small even to his own ears. “I’m going to audition to be a stripper.”

“Buck up, Captain Rogers,” says Hill, smirking a little bit. “Agent Romanoff put in a good word for all three of you. You’re basically in. Just win over the club owner (one of you might consider being a honeypot, see how that works) and then just roll with it. The deeper in this cover you can get, the better.”

“Wait,” says Steve, rising from the floor, shaking his head. “This still – I’m not…” His sentence trails – how the hell is he supposed to say this sanely?

“Spit it out, Steve-o, we haven’t got all day,” says Bucky, clapping Steve so hard on the shoulder with his metal arm that he knocks Steve over a little bit into the table. “Oops,” says Bucky, steadying Steve with one hand on Steve’s chest and another hand on his arm. “You good?”

“Yeah,” says Steve, far too aware of Bucky’s proximity. “Fine.”

“Good, that means you can explain why you just went red like a tomato,” says Sam. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know how to dance like that,” he mutters, but despite his attempts to be quiet and not have to admit it to a room of people who are pretty much guaranteed to mock him for it, Bucky still hears him.

But Bucky just rolls your eyes. “You can totally dance like that,” he says, waving it off. “Have you seen your hips? You’re all muscle. Just swivel them and, like, thrust a little bit.”

“Try twerking,” Sam suggests.

“What’s that even mean?” Steve asks giving Bucky a look. “God, it’s like a whole new language. A creepy one, at that. I don’t know the moves!”

Bucky rolls his eyes again, and sighs deeply. “Look, you’ll be fine. Just shake your butt like Captain Buttmerica in that movie Stark showed us.”

Agent Hill barks out a laugh. “Oh, god, he showed you all too?” she asks.

Bucky nods gravely. “Took one for America, that Bucky lookalike did.” Bucky frowns. “Granted, he was a lot smaller than I am.”

“So it looks like we don’t have to worry about Barnes’ dancing,” says Coulson, looking all kinds of annoyed that the meeting’s been entirely hijacked by a need to discuss a Captain America porno from the 70s. “Steve, we’ve got some videos for research purposes.” Sam’s eyebrows shoot up at that one, and Bucky just snorts. Coulson ignores them. “If you feel the need to watch them to get an idea, do it. But be prepared in a week. We need you three.” His voice turns grave, and Sam, Bucky and Steve all look at him. “We need to get those women out of there,” says Coulson sternly. “And I hate to admit it, but it looks like the only way we can infiltrate effectively is to make you guys take your clothes off undercover. Are you all in?”

With a long suffering sigh, Bucky nods. “Nudity for freedom,” he says solemnly. “It is a price I am definitely willing to pay.”

Sam shrugs. “If Cap and Barnes are going, I’m in. I better get a hefty paycheck for this one.”

Coulson chuckles. “If the op is effective, you won’t need to worry in the slightest about it.”

All eyes turn to Steve, who finds himself sitting in a chair around the table frowning a bit. On one hand, this is pretty much the last thing he’s ever seen himself doing. On another hand, why not? It’s a new century.

And the idea that maybe he could watch Bucky dance like that? Well, that was kind of hard to avoid as well – the idea gets stuck in his mind fast, and before he’s thought it through all the way, he says, ““I’m in. And give me those videos. Just in case.”

Coulson hands them to Steve as he walks out of the room, but Bucky manages to pop over his shoulder.

“Is that Shakira?” asks Sam. “Because I could use that DVD of all of music videos as, um. Practice.”

“No,” says Steve sternly, “th-that one’s mine.”

Bucky pats Sam on the shoulder. “Steve’s got a thing for ladies with big hair and pretty eyes.”

Steve swallows hard as he takes a good look at a full on DVD on top of the pile.

“Magic Mike?” he asks. “What’s this?”

He just gets a maniacal chuckle from Sam. “Watch that one first,” says Sam. “Just – that’s your first one.”

Coulson coughs like he wants to get back to the debriefing, but Steve doesn't miss how Bucky's eyes linger on the Jennifer Lopez concert DVD.

* * *

Bucky’s a little excited, if he’s honest, for this op. For seventy years now, he’s been instructed to kill to “save the world” by people who would beat the crap out of him for an original thought. Now he’s being instructed to dance on stage, his metal arm disguised, in front of a room of beautiful, cheering women? To actually save people?

Like that’s an actual job.

He has to admit, though, that there’s another motivator: Steve. He knew Steve would eventually have agreed to it – Steve’ll agree to anything as long as he thinks it’ll save a life – but he’s not sure Steve knows how to do it. It, of course, being gyrate and swivel his superhips around a stage without getting flustered that he’s not doing it exactly right.

Bucky, thus, has taken it upon himself to help Steve out. Even if it is selfishly motivated.

It begins when he realizes Steve suddenly has a beard. Not a big one, it’s more like scruff. It’s almost more like, “Holy crap, Cap’s baby face is gone,” than anything.

But it sure doesn’t help Bucky’s long shoved away sense that the deep “brotherly” love he felt for Cap, as they called it in the history books, has been seventy years of another type of passion.

He swallows hard and opens knocks on the wall to the living room, where Steve is watching the television intently.

“Hey, Scruffy, seen my roommate around? Handsome, wholesome fella, clean shaven?” He thinks the handsome bit’s going a little far, but Steve doesn’t react. So maybe he didn’t step over a line.

Steve looks up at him, and drags his fingertips over the edges of his beard, giving a little smile. “Oh, yeah,” he says. “Part of, um, my disguise. I mean, I’m Captain America. I gotta make myself change a little bit.”

Bucky eyeballs him. “A bit of scruff’s going to do that? What’s your act going to be, angsty hipster?”

“Act?” Steve asks.

Bucky drops himself onto the couch. “I don’t know. An act! Like, we’re sexy policemen or sexy soldiers or something.”

“Sexy soldier is out for me,” says Steve, making an utterly hilarious scrunched up expression. “What are you doing?”

Bucky drops his head casually in Steve’s lap. “I’m thinking,” he closes his eyes and looks up at Steve, making sure to turn on some smoldering bedroom eyes, “I’ll be a sexy, emotionally distant rockstar. I watched a bunch of movies and concert videos the year I was okay but not allowed to go off and you stuck me here in the Tower alone.”

 "You spent that time watching movies?” Steve asks.

“What else was I going to do?” Bucky scoffs. “Go play checkers with Jarvis?”

“Point taken.”

Bucky shifts a little bit so he can see Steve. “Anyway, Stark’s got a hologram in place to disguise the metal arm, so I can do the whole shredded tank thing. Skinny jeans and all that. I’m gonna put on makeup and stuff. Eye liner. Maybe some mascara.” He considers it for a moment. “Maybe I’ll put on lipstick, just to get it a little more interesting.”

Steve snorts. “Oh, come on,” he says. “Girls won’t like that.”

“Girls like lots of stuff now!” says Bucky. “Like, all kinds of stuff. Have you been on the internet?”

The blush rising incredibly high on Steve’s cheekbones catches Bucky’s interest immediately. “Oh, wow. I need to know what’s causing that reaction,” he laughs. “What did you see?”

“Awful things,” whimpers Steve, “terrible – a video by a fan to some song called My Immortal? It’s by Evan’s Essence or something. It’s not the song that’s bad it’s – what I saw. And there were edited pictures of me and Tony…” Steve makes a tiny, pained little noise, and drops his head in his hands. “God, I was scarred for life.”

Bucky snorts. “You should have seen the interesting one of Clint and the Hulk.”

“You mean Bruce?” Steve asks.

Bucky shakes his head. “No,” he says meaningfully. “The Hulk.”

Steve’s eyes widen. “Lord almighty.”

“There’s stories with him in there too,” says Bucky, “but that one was just awful and I’m not recounting it because I’ve selectively erased it from my brain, along with the ones about Thor and Loki.”

The look on Steve’s face was absolutely worth the comment.

“Anyway,” says Bucky. “How are you going to pull the scruffiness?”

“I’m growing a beard for a disguise,” says Steve. “I’ll think of something to do with it.”

Bucky shrugs and pushes himself up on Steve’s leg. Steve jolts a little bit as Bucky’s metal fingers curl around his thigh and Bucky accidentally, he SWEARS accidentally, brushes his thumb against Steve’s inner thigh and there’s this brief, intense moment where their faces are a little too close and Bucky’s heart is beating a little too fast.

It’s gone when the oven beeps – goddamned thing’s so LOUD, who designed this? – and they both jump about a foot.

“Lasagna’s ready,” says Bucky, his voice embarrassingly high. “Uh, tell me about that beard thing later,” he adds. “I’m planning on watching Magic Mike during dinner. You mind?”

Steve shrugs. “I, uh, I already saw it,” he says. “But I’d be up for seeing it again.”

Bucky can tell he’s trying not to blush, and he desperately wants to watch Magic Mike now, just to get Steve to blush like that again.

Yep, definitely not brotherly feelings. He’ll worry about what that means later, when he’s not trying to develop his stripper character.

Good god, what the hell did his life become?

“Well then,” says Bucky, coming back into the room with two plates of lasagna and a giant glass of orange soda for both of them, because it came with the pizza they’d ordered the night before and why not, “I’m interested in seeing this movie, if you’re willing to see it again.”

And there’s that blush again, but this time there’s a smile next to it. Suddenly it’s clear to him in a sharp, stunning blast: Bucky’s greatest desire in life is to be the one responsible for that dumb smile and that silly blush.

He needs refocus before he does something stupid and makes Steve feel like a piece of meat.

“Good lasagna,” says Steve, mouth full and covered in sauce.

“Slow down, Super Snacker,” laughs Bucky. “And wipe your face, lumberjack, you’re getting sauce in your beard.”

Steve frowns. “I’m no lumberjack.”

“Sure you aren’t.”

* * *

"I can't believe you're still going with that outfit," chuckles Bucky, shooting a glance over at Steve. “I mean, Sam and me, sure. I’ve got the dirty mind and Sam’s from this actual century, but good ol’ Steve Rogers? Looking like a lumberjack and auditioning for a strip club?” He shakes his head, eyes lingering as he trails his gaze from Steve’s heads to his toes. “Never would have imagined it.”

Steve frowns a bit, adjusting the suspenders on his sexy nerd getup. "It’s our only option to complete the mission," he says firmly, but he can't keep himself from allowing his gaze to linger a bit on Bucky's ass in the skinny rockstar jeans. “And for the last time, it’s nerd! I’m a nerd! A-a sexy nerd, if you must. The beard’s part of it.” He clears his throat. “And you’re looking equally ridiculous. Are those jeans painted on or are they actual fabric?”

"Cap," says Sam sternly. He looks uncomfortable, adjusting his fireman suit and frowning a little, "please don't ogle Agent Barnes. I'm in the room."

Bucky turns around. "You're ogling me?" he asks, sounding way too gleeful. "Oh, man, just wait til I get the eyeliner on. Then you'll be all over this too, Sam."

Sam snorts. "Over my dead body, Barnes."

"Tried that once," Bucky replies airily, "didn't take." He swaggers over to the vanity where a couple of the other guys are smearing on some shimmery brown stuff Sam called bronzer and laughed at. “Anybody here know how to put on eyeliner?” he asks. “My experiences are exclusively with war paint.”

“Kinda what we call it here,” chuckles a dark haired man, dressed in a soldier getup. Steve fights back a chuckle at the uniform – sure, it was camo, but it also had clear tearaway parts to reveal the guy’s butt.

Steve’s still not sure why he agreed to this job.

Bucky takes the stick – it looks like a black pencil – and studies it for a moment. “Yeah,” he says warily, “no freakin’ way I can do this without stabbing myself in the eye. Little help here, pal?” The grin on his face, the simple smirk and gleam in his eye tells Steve…Yeah, that might be why he agreed to it.

“Don’t call me that,” Steve replies automatically, “and what makes you think I’ll be any better at it?”

“Aw, come on,” says Bucky, and he gives this little smirk with those red lips of his that could basically make Steve drop to his knees if asked (but he won’t be asked and he shouldn’t think if he’d be asked because, well, no.) “Didn’t that serum steady your hand?”

Knowing it’s a futile argument, Steve strides over and plucks the pencil out of Bucky’s hand, and studies it like he has some sort of idea how to use it.

“It goes on my eyes,” says Bucky. The tone is helpful, but that stupid smirk hasn’t left his face.

“Oh, shut up, Rockstar Boy,” grumbles Steve, and draws the eyeliner over Bucky’s lids.

Sam just laughs.

“Oh, come on, man, is Captain America really going to be your makeup artist?”

“He’s going to be your hospital visit,” says Steve, “if you don’t shut up and let me do my job. Don’t blow my cover.”

Bucky and Steve start laughing. “You pissed off the lumberjack,” snorts Bucky, “I’d watch out, _Adam_ , if I were you.”

Steve sighs and ignores both of them. “I’d watch who I was mouthing off to. Meaning I wouldn’t mouth off to someone who had a stick of paint in their hand. That was going near their eyes.”

Bucky, then, does something horrible that Steve hates, but actually really loves and is uncomfortable for loving it. He pouts a little bit, a full red lip already painted with a little stage lipstick jutting out just so. Steve can’t imagine women liking this – but Steve does. Steve really does.

Steve coughs and tries to not look at Bucky for much longer. He focuses on the eyeliner in his hand, trying to do everything even like he’d seen Peggy’s, done meticulously without a second thought every morning. He appreciates women even more for the effort they put in. This stuff is hard.

“Alright,” says Steve, after his last touch up, “I think you’re good.”

Bucky peeks at himself in the mirror. “Damn,” he says. “I kind look good in eyeliner.”

“Yeah, you do,” says Steve without thinking, and he immediately wants to go crawl up in a hole somewhere.

There’s a beat. Then Bucky says, “Hope the ladies like it, right?” He offers a grin and stands, a little close to Steve.

Steve feels his chest tighten. He moves away.

Bucky gives him a weird little look, then walks over to see where the guys who have worked here since its start do their little choreographed dance for the ladies.

Steve spends a few moments trying to figure out how they’re moving, but there’s not much he can connect from the visual to the actual application with his body. He can jump from a glass elevator about eight billion feet off the ground then get back up after bouncing, but he can’t move his hips in a dancing manner.

He finds himself wondering if there’s a serum that enhances sexiness.

“Can you believe this?” Steve says to Bucky. “I can’t do that. Am I expected to do that?”

“Of course you can,” says Bucky, waving it off, “you totally could do that. Just try it out when you go out there and figure it out.”

Steve goes to respond, but then the men are done dancing, and they’re coming off stage.

Which means -

“Sebastian,” says Lady Wayland, “you’re up next.” She narrows her eyes as she looks Bucky-called-Sebastian up and down, “Good work on that stage makeup. You’ve got a steady hand on you.”

“It was actually S-Chris’ work,” says Bucky, who shoots Steve a look.

“I told you,” Steve says, “Don’t call me Chris. It’s Christopher.”

Wayland shrugs. “Whatever. I’ll call you Toph if it’ll get you to keep your boy’s eyeliner on point like that each time.” She chuckles. “Hell, even if you suck at dancing, I’ll keep you around just to do his makeup.”

Steve blushes a little bit. “Well, I hope I don’t disappoint you, ma’am.”

“Quit ma’am-ing me,” she says sternly. “Jesus, it’s like you’re from the forties.”

Sam quickly turns his snicker into a cough, and Steve fights his desire to whack him in the back of the head.

Lady Wayland, or Wayland, as she asks to be called, is the primary target for the mission. The thought is that she’s a Hydra agent working in front of the scenes. In the debriefing, Bucky hadn’t recognized her, but that doesn’t make her safe. Steve is on his guard and monitoring her every move- if she does anything out of the ordinary, he wants to catch it.

There’s a sudden increase of cheering out on the stage, and Brant, the dancer from before, swaggers out. He, it seems to Steve, needs no character. He just goes out there half naked and walks back in mostly naked.

Apparently the garment Brant has left on still is called a banana hammock. Steve’s got no desire to figure out where that name came from.

“Alright, go ahead,” Wayland pauses to, oh, smack Bucky on the ass. “Go get ‘em, rockstar.”

“Believe me,” says Bucky with a devlish little smirk as he smudges the eyeliner again beneath his eye, and shakes out his hair again. He’s got his swagger back, it’s taken so long, but it’s definitely something Steve loves to see, “I’ve got plenty of practice.”

Wayland leaves to get to her hostess post, and Sam joins Steve, watching silently from the wings.

His jaw drops as he watches Bucky swagger onto the stage, the lighting catching his cheekbones and making his eyes light up.

“He’s going to end up being way too good at this,” mutters Sam. “I knew that tortured soul vibe was projected from somewhere. Was he a rocker in a past life? Did he moonlight as Mick Jagger?” Sam pauses. “Was he Mick Jagger? Is Mick Jagger the Winter Soldier?”

“Let’s just hope he doesn’t mess this up with that arm of his,” Steve replies, his eyes locked on where Bucky’s casually walking from either side of the stage with a smirk. It’s to some angry sounding song – Fall Out Boys, Sam had called them. Then, a beat hits and Bucky’s ripping the jacket off to reveal –

“Does that even count as a shirt?” Sam says, looking confused. “Damn, man, it’s like he stuck a tank top through a shredder and then stuck it over his head.”

Steve will not admit to enjoying it. He will not. Not even a little. Not even when Bucky literally rips the rest of the tank top off to the lyrics, “I’m just dreaming of tearing you apart.” His abs are just as well defined as ever, the serum given to him by Zola keeping his body just as cut as Steve’s serum keeps his.

“You’re ogling him again,” Sam singsongs, and Steve feels blood rush to his cheeks. “Just say something, dude. You’re Captain America. I’m sure he’d be into it.”

Steve scritches at his beard, a habit he’s developed since the thing got so bushy. “I don’t know,” he clears his throat, “um, know what you’re talking about. Plus, Bucky’s never really liked the Captain America s-”

“Oh, damn it, Steve, come on.” Steve can’t see him, but he knows Sam’s rolling his eyes. “You wanna play this game or do you want to be honest with me? You know you’re looking at him just like all those girls are.”

“Not like that,” says Steve firmly, “I actually care about him.” Sam raises an eyebrow. “You set me up for that one.”

“Yes, I did,” says Sam. “Come on, look at that. He totally knows what he’s doing. I’m not even into dudes usually and I think it’s kind of hot.”

Steve gives Sam a look. “What?” says Sam. “Can’t a guy appreciate the sculpted abs of another man?”

“The future is a strange place,” says Steve, and Sam gets the Look on his face. The one where Steve feels like he’s reading his mind and, really, it’d be really weird if it weren’t so…nice, really, to have a friend who gets him from the 21st century.

“No one’s going to say anything, Steve,” says Sam quietly. “I- I know, back then, it wasn’t, well, safe. But now, those who say anything against it kind of get torn down. Torn to pieces, kind of.” Sam frowns. “What I’m trying to say is anyone who says anything against you will be basically destroyed. By me. And, probably, Natasha.”

Steve gives him a little smile, and goes to respond, but they both jump about a foot when they hear a huge amount of applause from the audience.

Bucky comes barreling in, some sort of adrenaline excitement coming off of him in waves.

“Holy shit!” he exclaims, shirtless and breathless and, er, kind of sweaty. “That was insane. Did you see that?”

Steve nods while Sam says, “Hell yeah, man, you rocked that stage.”

“Christopher,” calls Lady Wayland, “you’re up.”

Steve steadies himself and sends a nervous smile to Sam and Bucky, adjusting his suspenders and perching the black framed glasses correctly on his nose. They feel weird, and he can see the frames around his eyes at every moment. It’s a little wrong. “Alright, guys,” he says with a bit of a wince, “here goes nothing.”

The stage lights are blinding as he pushes through the center stage curtains with a confidence he doesn’t really have, just as the guitar starts up in his song. He’s a little overwhelmed, but at least he hadn’t gotten tangled in the curtains. That had been his biggest fear, the curtains, wrapping around him until he tripped and face planted. Sure, he gained coordination from the serum, but this was not his usual rodeo.

Steve walks out of the curtains, sending smirks to women sitting around them. At least, he hopes they’re smirks and not confused grimaces. God, he wished he hadn’t been set up to go after Bucky. He knew he’d suck compared to Bucky. Oh, god.

And then, suddenly, the first lyrics begin, and it hits Steve: He’s Christopher the nerdy stripper. He’s not Steve Rogers or Captain America.

He’s nobody at all. And it sends a surge of confidence through him. He runs his thumbs down his suspenders and listens to a few cheers from the crowd, slowly pulling the suspenders to the side as the track croons, “have you no idea that you’re in deep,” and he finally thinks he could get the hang of this.

His shirt, conveniently, is snaps instead of buttons, but he makes a play that he’s shyly trying to unbutton it at first, playing with his suspenders. Then, when the chorus hits, swelling and strong, he goes to rip open his shirt.

It’s not snaps. It’s buttons.

For a split second, he’s frozen stock still, no idea what to do.

That’s when he locks eyes with Bucky, who, without hesitation, darts out onto the stage and, nodding at Steve, helps him unbutton with a wink at the audience.

Steve shrugs shyly, and doesn’t miss when Bucky, obviously frustrated, breaks out the metal arm (still disguised, thank god) and just rips the shirt open, buttons flying everywhere.

Steve realizes this is easier with Bucky onstage, somehow. He can pretend, in the back of his mind, that they’re just messing around like they always do. Just with a little more nudity involved.

He pulls off the shirt, and the cheering gets even louder. Bucky plays off of it, running his hands up and down Steve’s arms, and in that moment Steve’s glad they never got that HC tattoo on their back that they drunkenly plotted out back in 44. It was Dum Dum’s idea, that all the Howling Commandos “get inked to always be linked,” but the idea fell through. It would have been a dead giveaway, though who could have ever guessed Steve and Bucky would be stripping in 2016?

Steve finds himself being pulled around by the tie, which he is somehow still wearing, by Bucky, and then he finds his khakis being ripped off.

Which is kind of a disappointment, because he really wanted to be able to do that.

Bucky’s standing in front of him, dangling his pants in front of him and laughing.

Steve turns to the audience, who cheer loudly.

The rest of the song consists mainly of Steve strutting around the stage, nodding to women and trying out tentative dance moves, while Bucky takes care of the writhing stuff. Some of that writhing, actually, happened on Steve. He tries not to think about it too much, because problems happen in his pants when he thinks too hard. Steve tried, but no matter how many times he watched those scenes in Magic Mike, he couldn’t figure out how to move his body that way. Just wasn’t in his build.

They dart off the stage to hear Wayland saying, “You’re up next, Adam. Do a good job.”

That’s when Sam taps Steve on the shoulder, two fingers, one, then two again.

Which meant Sam might have figured something out about the mission.

Steve turns to say something to Bucky, but Wayland intercepts them and grins.

“Looked like you were pretty lost there for a moment,” she says with a smirk. Her gaze is right on Steve, looking like she’s eating him alive. “You’re lucky your boy got out there to save you.”

Steve blushes. “I’m sorry, it just…It was different in front of so many people instead of just in the audition room.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she interrupts. “We’ve got a lot of women here who had a much better reaction to the two of you than just Christopher up there. At first I was convinced that I can’t hire you on your own, but…” She looks between Steve and Bucky. “Since Sebastian’s in regardless, I’m sure we can fit a double routine in for you two. You have great chemistry – maybe can be a duet of sorts.”

Steve’s face is probably something like a clown mask of surprise right now, but Bucky rushes in and saves him. “I wouldn’t mind,” says Bucky. “You okay with that, Chris?”

“Don’t call me Chris,” Steve says automatically, “and yeah, sure.” He stares Wayland down. “But I am planning on proving you wrong. I want my own part.”

Wayland grins. “Good. You may not have the moves, but you’re built like a superhero in more ways than one.”

Her eyes glance down to Steve’s crotch, which is still only clad in the Batman underpants Sam convinced me would be the funniest, and Steve blushes, fighting the urge to cover himself. Bucky, to his left, tries to hide a snicker.

“You’ve done good, boys,” she says, “now let’s go watch your friend.”

* * *

Bucky is extremely aware of the fact that Steve has a hard on. He was aware on this onstage, and is aware of it now.

He is also aware of the fact that he, Bucky’s, packing a little something as well, and hopes Steve doesn’t think too far into it.

He and Steve scramble for the rest of their clothing, since they’re officially done for the night, and shuffle into a corner where they can be alone and see Sam do his thing.

Sam’s got this in the bag. Admittedly, Steve was kind of…not great. It’s not an insult, really, it’s just that Steve hasn’t quite got the necessary skills to do the striptease. Yet, at least.

Sam, on the other hand, looks like he was born to dance. He’s doing something with his hips that’s making even Bucky swallow hard, but Bucky’s distracted when Steve lays a hand on his shoulder and whispers into his ear, “Sam’s got some sort of intel.”

Bucky turns to him. “Like?”

Steve shrugs. “Got no idea. It kind of seemed like he wanted to talk about it, but he had to go onstage. We’ll talk to him about it tonight after the show, okay?”

Bucky nods, but the rest of the night is a blur. He didn’t want to admit it to anyone, but this job was more personal than anything. There’s going to be a part of him, until the day he dies, that feels pure and unadulterated hate for anyone Hydra, that feels like his utter responsibility for the rest of his life is to destroy and decimate all those who may have been part of his kidnapping, his reworking, his damage.

The violence in his past is scary (because other words he’s used to describe it are too real, too harsh,) but the desire to do violence now is even scarier, sometimes makes him think the Winter Soldier is taking over again. But when he takes a moment to talk it out with his therapist, he knows it’s all about him wanting to retake his power and be himself.

And, apparently, it’s normal to want to hurt back the people who hurt you. As normal as it could get, in that kind of situation. It was kind of nice to know that something about Bucky was slightly normal.

As they leave and meet up with Natasha on the way out, Sam starts talking. “It turns out she’s very sensitive about who sees her phone,” he says, jumping right in. “I think it would be a good idea to either tap it or figure out a way to bug the room and the phone.”

“Can we do that?” Steve says. “Legally, I mean. I don’t want anything we do to interfere with a trial. We need to do this as cleanly as possible.”

Sam sighs. “I agree with you, Cap, but the problem is that there was definitely something going on while we were there. Wayland was yelling at them to shut up pretty quick, but before that I heard something about moving ‘them’ and getting things together. I think they’ve planned another brain wipe for whoever they’ve got right now.”

Bucky involuntarily stops, and as hard as he tries to get himself out of the funk, memories flash across his vision. He doesn’t want it to happen here, it can’t happen here, but it’s happening. Something so small, just a few little words, and he’s there. A cold chair, cold faces, cold hands, cold needles, cold sweat, cold fear. Cold, cold, cold, a wash of terror and pain and loss so violent it’s like he’s back in the chair with cruel faces and ripping hands not giving him a moment’s peace.

“Bucky?” comes Sam’s voice, quiet and too far away. “Bucky, you’re here. You are on a street in New York City. Steve is holding your hand. My hand is on your shoulder. You are safe.”

It sounds like he’s been saying the same words over and over again, and after a few moments, his head clears. He’s no longer spinning. He’s no longer back in that chair.

“I’m safe,” he says carefully, uncertain, and he grips Steve’s hand to see if it’s all true. To make sure it’s not just a lie Hydra’s put into his head to scare him.

The hand squeezes back, running a thumb along his hand.

His eyes clear.

Sam’s face is closest, expression concerned and kind. “There you are,” he says quietly. “Hey. You good?”

Bucky tries to say yeah, but unfortunately it comes out as a squeak. Steve chuckles. “No need to talk yet, okay?” His voice is gentle and easy. “Take your time, Buck.”

Bucky nods, and, not really knowing what he’s doing, turns into Steve’s chest. He wants out of the world for a second, and he knows maybe it’s going to be weird afterwards, but this is what he feels like doing every single time that happens. It’s the place he feels safest. Before, he had to protect Steve. Now Steve is protecting him, and right now he can bury his face into Steve, and right now that’s what feels safe. So that’s what he does.

There’s not even a second of waiting time before Steve puts his arms around him. “Hey,” Steve says quietly, “hey, you’re okay.”

Eventually, Bucky gets himself back, and he smiles at everyone. “Sorry about that, guys.”

“No need to apologize,” says Natasha. “It happens to the best of us.”

* * *

When they get home, Steve’s keeping an eye on Bucky, because he wants to keep him safe and keep him from getting triggered like that again.

But, it seems, he’s okay now. He’s joking and smiling, and kissed Sam and Natasha on the cheek when they had to part. It was obviously a point to show that he was okay, the little bit of intimacy.

He also didn’t let go of Steve’s hand. Which was a whole new kind of interesting.

They watch some movie about giant robots for a few minutes, and the fact that Bucky’s kind of draped himself on top of Steve with the bowl of popcorn in his hands is making parts of Steve do things that are extremely not okay to do when you’re having a perfectly platonic and nonsexual cuddle with your best friend.

Steve shifts and moves carefully, coughing a little bit. “I, um, I have to go shower.”

Bucky looks up at him, his mouth full of popcorn. He looks a little like a hamster. “You want me to pause it?” he asks, barely understandable through the food.

“Nah,” says Steve, grinning down to him, and if anyone asked him why he reached down and brushed a little hair off of Bucky’s face, he won’t tell them why.    

Steve steps in to the shower, and turns on the radio. He feels a little bit like a creep for this, but it’s better than letting his erection do the talking for him when he leaves the shower. The music gets louder, a track off of the same album Sam chose his dance song from, and he wraps a hand around himself, biting his lip to keep from gasping too loudly. The music swells and Steve strokes himself slowly, letting the images from that night, Bucky in the leather pants, wash over his vision. He spent the rest of the evening trying to force the memories away, tried to keep from thinking about it.

Unfortunately, all that effort got him here in the shower with his hand wrapped around his dick. He rationalizes it as normal, everyone does it now. And it’s better to confront the feelings in private then startle Bucky in the future, right?

The song changes to the one he dances to – Do I Wanna Know, he thinks the name is – and he whimpers a little, feeling a bit pathetic, as he twists his wrist and gets a little stuck on when Bucky ripped his shirt open, gets a little desperate when he thinks of the gleam in Bucky’s eyes when he slid down Steve’s body and slowly back up again, dragging his hands against Steve’s stomach.

It doesn’t take long before Steve’s bracing himself against the wall of their shower, nails digging into the palm of his hand as he makes a fist. His other hand works himself quickly, roughly, because he can’t take too long and doesn’t want to take too long.

When he finally comes, he can’t keep a moan from slipping from his lips, something slightly resembling the name of the man sitting in his living room who he just recently got back.

The shower washes it away and Steve makes sure he washes and shampoos as quickly as he can so it doesn’t seem suspicious. He steps out of the bathroom with a towel wrapped around his waist.

And promptly runs right into Bucky, who’s in his boxers and nothing else, and who catches him by the shoulders as Steve stumbles.

“Whoa, there,” laughs Bucky. “Can I not even trust you to take a shower on your own? You’re all…wobbly.”

Steve feels himself go red, and it’s not from the shower. Can Bucky tell? Does Bucky know?

The rational part of his brain tells him that, no, he can’t know. But he always wonders how advanced Bucky’s hearing is from Zola’s version of the serum.

“Now move, you big lug, I’ve got to take a shower now.” He grins at Steve. “Hope you didn’t use up all the hot water.”

In a move that’s so Bucky Steve almost cries, Bucky steals Steve’s towel and smacks him on the ass with it.

“Hey!” Steve exclaims, covering himself with his hands. “What the hell was that?!”

Bucky just whacks him again and darts into the bathroom before Steve can fight it off.

* * *

The next week goes by quickly. Mornings are slept in, afternoons are overviews with SHIELD or relaxing on the couch with Bucky, or Sam, or Bucky and Sam, and evenings and nights are stripping at the club. Sam keeps coming over to help Steve on his dances, and Steve feels like he’s doing better. But he’s still nowhere near as good as Bucky or Sam.

Once, Sam comes out to help Steve instead of Bucky. It’s a Wednesday night, it’s more dead than other nights, and it’s been eight days since they started.

Steve’s abut to go onstage, readying himself for a different kind of night. The chords come out – Steve’s switched to “Truth or Dare” by Marianas Trench, because Arctic Monkeys was getting old, according to Wayland – and he steps out to the song, a little nervous because he’s not particularly up for it today. Tony had spent the night before calling him a rent boy, because what Tony thinks is funny rarely matches up to what is actually funny, and only stopped when Bucky strode up to him and gave him some choice words about how he could choose to shut up or get a foot up his ass. Tony had chosen the former, but it didn’t change the fact that Steve was still on edge.

When the lyrics start, he runs his hands a little awkwardly down his front, but it makes a little more sense as the lyrics match and he reaches the ground, crawling toward a woman at the table in the front. The lights go crazy during the bridge. The start of the chorus cues the ripping off of his shirt, and Steve’s a little panicky. Bucky hasn’t come out yet.

So he tries it himself and, thank god, it’s snaps this time. He rips it off. The lyrics croon, “Truth, dare,” and he’s sliding on his knees, trying to get into it alone, but it doesn’t quite feel right.

That’s when Sam soars out to help him.

It doesn’t feel wrong, exactly, it just doesn’t feel the same. Bucky’s good at touching Steve in ways that calm him and make him confident. Sam’s version is to dance around Steve, acting like he’s doing a dance battle instead of a lesson.

In terms of a battle, Sam definitely wins at the end of it, and Steve feels like he wants to run off the stage.

“That was awful,” he groans, pressing the heels of his palms to his eyes. “I was actually awful. That was awful. I’m going to ruin this two week probation for all of us.” He groans again.

“You didn’t ruin anything,” says Sam, coming back in while Wayland takes the mic to introduce him a second time, her standard speech altered by his entrance in Steve’s bit. “You just work better with Bucky, and I think, though you needed help, I was less familiar.” He chuckles. “I think I may have startled you a little, but it worked.”

“I’ve always done better with Bucky,” says Steve automatically. He doesn’t think of what that means when they’re grinding against each other.

That’s when Bucky bursts in from another part of the room, gasping and panting. “Steve, I’m so sorry,” he says desperately. “I shoulda been there, I just…” His eyes are lighting up, though. “I figured something out.”

Steve’s jaw drops, but before he can figure out what’s going on, Wayland’s calling Sam onstage and they don’t have time for it.

The rest of the night is a blur, Steve trying to figure out how the hell Sam can move like that alongside trying to figure out what Bucky could possibly have figured out.

He finds out when they’re back into their apartment in Avengers tower, having practically dragged Steve, Natasha, and Sam behind him in excitement.

“I know how they get the women to come with them!” Bucky says, looking a bit like a puppy as he bounces around the room. “I mean, it’s not a good thing.” The excitement stops. “But they have a drug – called rope-nal? Something like that. I think they drug the women who are alone or something then put them somewhere.” He’s pacing. “Yeah, they must have given them something in their drinks. They wouldn’t have noticed. Someone helping them off…” He looks back up at them. “It all fits.”

Natasha eyes his skeptically. “And you know this how?” she asks. Natasha’s used to Bucky’s frequent and often confused pacing, but today she looks a little less tolerant of it.

Bucky, for the record, stares her down. “Because I found about eight boxes labeled ‘Shoe Polish’ which was obviously suspect. So I opened a box, and in one of them there was a packet of something in it. I didn’t touch it, but there was a code on it. I looked up the code and it was for a drug called rope-nal.”

“How was it spelled?” Sam asks.

Bucky spells it out for them, simultaneously bringing up the search on his phone, and Sam sighs.

“Rohypnol,” says Sam, his tone one of disgust. “When I was an RA in college we had to do some serious crackdown on assholes using that stuff to drug girls at parties. We did a whole group of seminars on it.”

“Right,” says Bucky. “What does it do?”

“Put it in a drink, and it impairs motor skills, judgment. Can kill you if you add it to too much alcohol.” He shakes his head. “Goddamned fuckers.”

“So what can we do with this?” Steve asks.

“We can trace people ordering huge quantities of it,” says Natasha. “It’s black market, if they had that much, but I have some connections.” With that, she darts off.

“I fucking hate people,” says Bucky seriously.

Steve holds Bucky close, because he doesn’t want him feeling unsafe or scared, and Sam nods to him and heads out with a, “I’ll let Coulson know.”

Steve and Bucky spend the night, wide awake and then suddenly asleep, on the living room couch, because both of them know far too well what it means to be controlled by another.

They reach the end of the probation period rapidly. Steve feels like he’s been improving, but he can’t be sure. He’s not sure. Not at all, and on the final day of the two week probation period, as Wayland had called it, Steve’s terrified he’s going to get kicked out.

“We need to do something crazy,” says Steve. “Can we do something crazy?”

Bucky shrugs his shoulders. “I’m pretty sure being supersoldiers dressed as strippers dancing for money is the craziest I could come up with.”

Steve drops his head against the wall. “I’m gonna get fired. You and Sam are going to get the job and I’m definitely going to get fired.” He tests out a new word. “Because I suck.”

“Stop that!” says Bucky, sliding his right hand under Steve’s head to keep him from whacking it. “You don’t suck. And don’t use that word, it sounds weird coming out of your mouth. You’re awesome. We just found the one thing that you’re not stupidly amazing at.”

Steve whimpers. “Sure. The one thing.”

“Oh, shut up,” groans Bucky. “You’re amazing everywhere else, and you know it. Just – give it a try out there tonight. Do your best, okay?”

Steve nods. “Okay.”

That’s how he ends up grabbing Bucky back onstage, Lady Wayland watching the two of them as they try to hold onto their positions. Steve’s got a weird sort of determination tonight and it looks like he’s even baffling Bucky with how much control he’s taking.

He’s kind of just not in the mood to be told he can’t dance, though.

Steve’s ripped his shirt open, letting it flutter against the suspenders, and Bucky took care of his pants. Steve is about to pull Bucky’s shirt off when some girl shouts, “Kiss him!”

Steve freezes and looks at Bucky.

Other people join in, loud and punctuated with laughter.

Bucky keeps dancing around him, and Steve’s not sure if he wants the first kiss he’s had since Natasha when they were on the run to be with Bucky onstage. Though, when he thinks about it, he’d be okay having it with Bucky, because Bucky’s the only person Steve wants to kiss right now. The only person Steve’s wanted to kiss in a long time.

The chanting gets louder.

“You want ‘em to kiss?” asks Lady Wayland, giving them the eye. Suddenly, Steve realizes: it’s a test. She knows as well as he does that this could make or break his job.

Oh, hell.

“So let’s see it boys,” says Wayland, and, god, this is probably the most unfortunate Steve’s ever felt. _Oh, yeah, I’ll take a job where I’ve got to get naked and dance to try and save lives, but no, I have to kiss my best friend as a test instead of kissing him because he wants to kiss me._ Steve hates these parts of his life. But he kind of thinks it could be that extra thing that could keep him in this job. And if he can save the mission, what, really, is the kiss in the long run?

They women are chanting “kiss” even louder now, and Steve just barely sees Natasha sitting at the front desk with her head in her hands. Granted, she looks like she’s laughing, but he appreciates that she’s not looking.

“Bucky?” Steve breathes.

“Yeah, don’t talk,” says Bucky, “I’m taking in your lumberjack-ness.”

“I’m not a lumberjack,” Steve protests, but Bucky shrugs.

“You want to?” Bucky says and he’s staring at Steve so intently that he could almost pretend there weren’t half drunk ladies screaming at them. It’s distracting, because Bucky’s still running his hands along the suspenders. Focus is hard when Bucky does that. Really hard.

“Only if you wanna,” Steve tries to say, but Bucky’s hands are brushing up and down his sides and he can’t breathe because he can hear women cheering and, oh shit oh shit, oh NO there’s no way he can move away now.

Bucky kisses him firmly and Steve, oh hell, Steve just melts into it, dipping his head down for a better angle. It’s for show, he knows it is, he keeps telling himself it is, but there’s a little moan that falls from Bucky’s lips and the way his metal hand threads itself through Steve’s hair, he can almost pretend it’s not fake.

“Fuck, Steve,” mutters Bucky against Steve’s lips. “We should – we should probably stop.”

“No we can – we can keep going, we’ll just shake it up a little more.” Steve would be lying if he said he was okay with it being over. So he grabs Bucky behind the thighs and lifts him up, still kissing –

When someone taps his shoulder.

“Yes?” says Bucky, and Steve kind of snorts at the expression on Bucky’s face.

“We appreciate the show,” says Sam, quirking an eyebrow. “But you gotta make way for the public servants.”

“What are you gonna do?” Bucky asks, looking Sam up and down. Steve peeks over his shoulder to see that Sam, tonight, is in a policeman uniform. “Arrest us?”

There’s a wave of screams from the women in the audience. Sam looks startled.

“Off the stage boys,” laughs Lady Wayland from her seat. “Time for Officer Harden to take the stage.”

Steve gently sets Bucky down, and then promptly darts to get off of the stage, Bucky close behind him.

“I’m so sorry, Bucky, I can’t believe that just happened,” says Steve. He turns around. “I shouldn’t have let it go that far, I –”

He would have continued, but Bucky’s crowded him against the wall and is staring at him intently. “Please don’t apologize,” he mutters. “Just – don’t.”

And Bucky kisses him.

 


	2. Step 2: Infiltrate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Expect some unexpected characters to show up and here's where the rating comes in.

Bucky’s not sure what’s come over him. It was probably something to do with the lights, the heat of the stage, the cheering. But mostly, it has to do with Steve. Steve, clueless as all get out, with his beard and the glasses, and the suspenders. Steve, with a smile like sunshine and a voice thick and deep saying, “Only if you wanna,” like there’s anything in the world Bucky’d want more than Steve’s lips on him.

But he kisses Steve, and ignores all the painfully loud voices in his head (not the Winter Soldier ones, the ones that sound like his irate father or his concerned mother) telling him this isn’t the best idea or that he needs to think about what he’s doing.

And the voices shut up once Steve kisses back.

All Bucky can think of is how it feels to be kissing Steve, really kissing Steve, kissing him like their lives haven’t been torn apart time after time. Like Bucky isn’t a weaponized human. Like Steve didn’t go from little to huge in about thirty seconds flat. Granted, as much as it’s hurt Bucky in the past, right now he doesn’t mind that last one as much as he once did.

It’s different than he ever used to imagine in the old days. Steve’s, obviously, bigger, and Bucky never had a metal arm in the pictures he had once dreamt up in his mind. But there’s little noises from Steve, almost whimpers, and Bucky chokes back a groan somewhat like appreciation as Steve clutches him gently, opening his mouth just the slightest, just enough to slot their lips together for a short second.

They break apart. Bucky takes a moment to just look at Steve’s face, see the flushed cheeks, the bitten red lips, the bright blue eyes.

Warms his heart (and other places) to know that he was the one Steve let do that. That Bucky got to do that with Steve.

“So that was new,” says Steve, and the word choice floors Bucky. “No!” says Steve, reacting to something in Bucky’s face. “N-new in a good way. In a great way, Buck, I didn’t mean to make it sound bad. I’m just…” He trails off, his eyes darting down to Bucky’s lips, and Steve licks his own. “I got caught a little off guard.” He’s biting his lip nervously now, and Bucky thinks its the loveliest thing he’s ever seen. “I’ve wanted to do that for a long time.”

“So have I,” says Bucky and, in a stunning feat of irrational stupidity he’s blaming on the foggy head he got from the kiss, reaches out for Steve’s hand with his metal arm.

Steve takes it, not a flinch.

It floods something smooth and warm through Bucky’s heart. The way Steve’s stroking the weaponized fingertips is the same as he might a flesh and bone hand, no different and no more careful. Bucky squeezes his hand. Steve squeezes back.

Bucky feels like he might explode.

“You gonna say something?” Bucky asks, because he hasn’t been comfortable with silence since he became the Winter Soldier and wants to hear that breathless tone from Steve again.

Steve shrugs. “I was kind of hoping I could kiss you again.”

Bucky looks to the side, miming that he’s trying to decide, but he’s sure the smile on his face tells the truth. Then he sighs. “Well, I guess, if I have to – ”

And so Steve kisses him again.

This second kiss is deeper, slower. Less desperate. The kiss onstage felt strong and showy – for good reason – like Steve was proving something. These kisses, the ones in private, just for them, have Steve hesitant and gentle, a hand cupping Bucky’s cheek, another one still holding Bucky’s metal hand.

On stage, it was rough and a little bit wrong, but only because it was in front of so many people and, really, Bucky’d wanted his first kiss with Steve, had he ever gotten one, to be just the two of them.

But perhaps that kiss was Christopher and Sebastian kissing instead of Steve and Bucky.

“You’re thinking real loud,” says Steve, whispering into Bucky’s ear. Bucky shakes a little with the chill that runs down his spine. “Are you – do you not want –”

“Of course I want to,” says Bucky, “I just – I don’t want you to think… This is Bucky, not Sebastian,” he blurts, and good god, that couldn’t have sounded more ridiculous if he’d tried.

Steve chuckles. “And I’m Steve. Can I kiss you again or are you going to babble more?”

“Oh, I’m the babbler? I can’t believe –”

Steve interrupts him. Bucky kind of likes that. Second time it’s happened, and he thinks he might want to make a habit of it.

Bucky also likes, apparently, when Steve licks across Bucky’s lips, because he sighs again and opens them, and grips Steve’s shirt a little tighter when his tongue slides against Steve’s.

“So first, I’ll say finally, because finally, but really, in here?”

Steve and Bucky jump apart at Sam’s voice. Bucky looks anywhere but Sam’s eyes.

“It’s the last few guys, then the finale or whatever she wants to call it tonight,” says Sam, eyeing them. Then he smirks. “Unless you two just want to buy each other for a lapdance and go bang in the private room. I can see you two being down with that.”

Steve blushes and Bucky barks out a laugh. “Yeah, no, think we’re gonna do some recon and then head back to the stage when we’re needed to shake our butts again,” says Steve, shaking his head a little bit.

“We should probably put a little more clothing on,” says Bucky, gesturing to each other. Bucky’s still kind of in the shredded skinny jeans and no shirt, whereas Steve’s tear away khakis got lost in the shuffle of getting offstage. And his shirt’s hanging open.

The suspenders are still on, though. That’s a plus.

“I – I hadn’t noticed that,” says Steve carefully. “I’m going to go find my pants.”

“And I’m going to grab my shirt,” adds Bucky.

Sam breaks out in laughter. “Dude, it’s like you guys haven’t gotten caught going at it before.” He looks at each other them for a moment. “Oh, my god. You haven’t.” That’s when Sam gets a look on his face like he’s watching two puppies wrestling. “Oh, you adorable children. You live in Avengers Tower. That’s gonna start happening real soon.”

“Good to know,” grumbles Steve. “Now either help me find my pants or quit making sassy comments.”

“I can honestly say,” says Sam, throwing the khakis at Steve’s face, “that I never in my life expected to hear Captain America utter the word sassy in my presence.” He pulls back on the police officer uniform, adjusts the cap, and salutes the two of them. “Well, Sebastian and Christopher,” he says loudly, with a garish wink, “I’m going to go get myself a water. Enjoy yourselves.”

* * *

Steve suggests that he and Bucky go in separate directions to find some intel they can use, but it’s really because he’s not sure how to keep himself in check and he doesn’t want to risk hurting Bucky.

It’s been years – decades, lifetimes, really – since Bucky had any choice in what he wanted to do. There’s no way Steve’s taking that away from him just because Steve’s had feelings for him since they were around fifteen.

Alright, so feelings is minimizing it. It’s been an all-consuming ache for as long as he can remember, but that doesn’t give him any right to ask Bucky for something Bucky can’t give.

But he does hope Bucky meant it when he said he wanted to kiss Steve for a long time too.

There will be time for further discussion later, when they’re not dressed in ridiculous costumes, scouring the strip club for some hint that they’re on the right track and that they might get somewhere with this mission.

Steve’s in the middle of a room that resembles a scene he once saw in a 90’s movie, bright and weirdly colored and so definitely not belonging in a strip club, when he hears footsteps barrel up behind him. He’s ready to react, to defend, but instead of a danger, he sees Bucky, looking startled and a little confused.

“I found something,” is all he needs to say before Steve’s coming up after him at a little more than a run.

Bucky stops abruptly near a wall, something that looks vaguely puce colored staining a bit near the floor. Steve makes the choice not to look.

“I’ve always been confused about the layout of the place,” says Bucky, voice quiet. “It didn’t make sense. I’ve taken in some spatial stuff – blue prints, measurements, that kind of thing – and could never reconcile the size of the back of the building with the room on the blueprints. Up until last week I was thinking it was just something to do with the whole strip club business – I don’t know, like wardrobe went back farther than either of us understood - but now I’ve got a better idea.”

Steve looks at him expectantly. When Bucky gets excited about a mission, it tends to be a little difficult to keep him focused on what he’s trying to explain. It’s a nice change from the ever pragmatic Winter Soldier, because it shows that a piece of Bucky will always shine through, but at the same time it’s exasperating because Steve has no clue what he’s going for.

“Did you find something?” Steve hazards a guess, because he’s got no idea what to say other than that, but he gets a nod.

“Steve,” says Bucky, “it’s an extra room. There’s an extra room off of the back, it’s tiny, but it’s housing a bunch of people, I’d bet my life.”

Steve’s jaw drops. “How did you find that?”

Bucky shrugs. “I’m good at things like that,” he says. “Plus, I might have heard something come from the walls. I didn’t want to risk scaring people, so I didn’t knock, but –” Bucky looks at him with this little puppy dog expression. “Think I did good?”

Steve pulls him close and hugs Bucky. “You did better than good,” he mutters, “you’re a genius.”. He knows he should break away before anyone else comes in, but he doesn’t care at all right now. “You’re amazing.”

Bucky settles against him, arms wrapping around him, and he sighs. Steve finds himself smiling, giddy and warm wrapped around Bucky.

“This has been quite a productive evening,” says Bucky in his ear.

Steve just laughs, and through the rest of the night counts down the time until the next time he and Bucky get a moment alone together, time they can just talk it out.

Or, maybe, not talk. They’ve done a lot of talking in their time.

Which is why, when he’s walking through the door of their apartment, ignoring Jarvis’ comments that Tony made them, “I’m sorry for calling you rent boys,” cupcakes, with Bucky right behind him, Steve feels anticipation and excitement well up in his chest.

“So,” says Steve carefully as he closes the door behind him. It’s late and everyone else, even JARVIS, is asleep, but Steve feels like a live wire. Granted, he’s got no idea what he was planning on saying after “So.” He hoped Bucky would say something to interrupt him, but he is doing no such thing and now Steve’s scrambling to find a comment.

“Knit,” replies Bucky, smirking, and it’s all Steve can do not to kick him or kiss him or throw him on the couch or something.

Steve, apparently, is not good at making spot on decisions when it comes to being romantically intrigued by Bucky Barnes.

“Crochet,” Bucky continues, “embroidery. Cross stitch. Okay, I’m out of things to say. What’s up?”

Steve thinks about what he means to say. He wants it to be succinct, sensible – “I don’t want to make you do anything you don’t want,” Steve blurts out, and he literally could not have said something less coherent. He blushes. “I mean –”

Bucky smiles, slow and warm, but just behind it something dirty and intriguing that has something shiver down his spine. “I know what you mean,” says Bucky, “and stop thinking you know better than I do. Because I want this,” he presses a kiss to Steve’s lips, “bad.”

Steve swallows. “H-how bad?”

Bucky gives him a look, oddly similar to his _Steve’s in a fight again? Aw, Christ_ look, and Steve’s confused about how the two coincide. “Oh, for god’s sake!” And that’s when Bucky hauls Steve close and kisses him hard, and Steve’s barely got enough time to process that Bucky’s kissing him like this, Bucky wants him, Bucky’s hands are on his – WHOA and there are Bucky’s hands on Steve’s ass, and it feels amazing and Steve can’t think.

“You gonna bring me to your room or should I drag you around to mine?” Bucky breathes in Steve’s ear.

Steve is embarrassed to discover that all he’s really capable of doing is letting out an embarrassing little moan that slightly resembles the word, “Mine.”

Bucky laughs, low and husky, and leans up to kiss Steve’s earlobe, along his neck, and then something snaps in Steve, because he pulls Bucky close and kisses him hard, trying to keep up with everything that’s happening.

And he decides that he’s going to be the one to drag Bucky to the room, which doesn’t really work, because Bucky’s trying to get there so fast that they get tangled up and each other and rather gracelessly stumble instead of walk.

They topple onto the bed, Steve on top of Bucky, and the movement has Bucky’s cock pressed right up against Steve’s leg and, oh god, Steve lets out a pathetic little whimper when he figures that out.

“Yeah,” says Bucky, reading how Steve was holding back for Bucky, “like you needed more proof I was into this.”

Steve surges up to kiss Bucky, running his tongue across the seam of Bucky’s lips and licking into his mouth as Bucky grips at Steve’s hair. He swallows Steve’s moan and bucks against his, leaving Steve breathless and brainless and –

“Hold on a second,” says Steve. “Wait, just – wait.”

It’s phrased wrong, and Bucky lets go immediately, searching Steve’s face for an apprehension he won’t find. “What’s wrong?” asks Bucky. “I’m sorry, did I –”

Steve shakes his head, running his fingertips through Bucky’s hair, not even stopping to hide the fact that he’s grinning like an idiot. “Nothing’s wrong. I just want to, uh…” He laughs, feeling a little nervous. “I want to show you something. I’ve been practicing. And tonight went in a different direction, so nobody saw it, but…”

As Steve leans up, Bucky follows him, keeping his lips just far enough away that they can still speak, but Steve can feel Bucky’s breath on his skin.

He clears his throat.

“Practicing what?” Bucky asks, looking a little confused.

He gets a grin in return, and Steve gently pushes him down onto the bed. “Just watch,” he says.

Steve gets out his phone, which is loud enough any day, and starts playing the new song he’d heard recently. It’s got pounding piano and strong drums, and lyrics that match perfectly with the mood.

He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t hoped this moment would happen. The song choice was deliberate and he hoped that it might send a hint.

When the lyrics begin, Steve slowly begins pulling his sweater off, rolling his hips in the way he had finally figured out as he tosses it somewhere else in his room. At the lyrics, “You shine a light on my dark side,” he leans over and turns on the light just a little, just enough for Bucky to see him. He sees Bucky’s slow smile spread, and Steve has to do a lot of work to keep himself from grinning like an idiot. It feels weird – Steve’s still not quite sure how to do it, isn’t sure he’ll ever quite figure out how to do it. Even so, Bucky’s eyes roam over Steve’s body, and Steve makes sure that he tries the thing Bucky does – running his hands through his hair.

Bucky swallows visibly. Hard. Steve fights back a smirk and a laugh.

The chorus starts, strong and driving beat enough to keep Steve in the moment, his eyes locked with Bucky’s. He gets a little stuck in his belt, but the warm, endeared smile from Bucky keeps him focused and smiling, and then he pulls off the shirt that was under his sweater.

There’s a strange vulnerability to being half naked in your bedroom in front of your best friend. A striptease for a bunch of horny women? That was actually kind of easy, if you pretend to be someone else and never make eye contact.

For Bucky, he’s worried he might do something that’s not right. He feels vulnerable, open here. Like he always does with Bucky. He wants this to be right.

However, the way Bucky’s jaw is gaping and his pupils are blown makes Steve seriously reconsider that idea.

He crawls over Bucky, unable to stand being away from his skin, his smile, and, god, those lips for this long, and presses the long line of his body up against Bucky’s. Bucky grips Steve’s shoulders until he can wind his arms around Steve’s neck and back into Steve’s hair.

“You’re so gorgeous,” Bucky gasps into Steve’s mouth, “wanted – wanted to tell you that since we were kids, since you were fifteen and getting drenched from that stupid blown fire hydrant.”

Steve pulls away for a second, cradling Bucky’s face in his hands. “You remember that?” he breathes.

Bucky rolls his eyes and smiles. “Of course I do, punk,” he says with a tiny press of his lips to Steve’s jaw. “You were in that white tee shirt and you looked so damned good – you always have.”

“Even back then?” Steve asks, confused. “But I was small.”

“You were never small,” says Bucky. “You were always the biggest, best guy in the room to me.”

“Stop saying stuff like that,” says Steve, a little choked up, “I was trying to strip for you and you made it all emotions and confessions and stuff.”

“To be fair,” says Bucky, running fingertips down Steve’s spine in a way that makes him shiver, “you stopped the striptease midway.”

“Only ‘cause I missed you.”

Bucky laughs. “Oh, okay,” he snorts. “Because that’s not emotions and confessions and stuff.”

“Shut up and kiss me again, jackass,” grumbles Steve, and he presses his lips to Bucky’s, loving the way Bucky’s fingers wind through his hair and pull just the tiniest bit.

They kiss, just kiss, for a while, until Steve’s hands roam from Bucky’s face to his shoulders down to his arms, and take his hands.

Bucky moves them upward, pressing them next to his head. “Always wanted you to pin me down,” he growls, kissing along Steve’s jawline. Steve’s hips twitch a little at that, and he unintentionally presses down on Bucky’s hands. Bucky’s eyes flutter closed and he gasps, his head tipping against the mattress.

Steve takes the opportunity, kissing against Bucky’s throat, testing out little nips (which get a groan from Bucky) and sucking kisses (which give Steve delicious moans from Bucky’s throat that turn him on in a new, unexpected kind of way.)

“Can I get naked too?” Bucky asks, and Steve grins a little as his voice breaks and goes breathy as Steve works at one spot, interested for many reasons in marking him with a small, sensitive bruise. Bucky whimpers, “Come on, please?”

Steve knows the appeal of skin on skin, so he rocks back to his heels and help Bucky pull of his tank top, taking time to brush his fingertips along Bucky’s chest, stopping far from the scarring on his left shoulder.

“You can touch,” says Bucky quietly, and there’s such naked honesty in that look that Steve just has to lean up and catch Bucky’s lips in a quick, small kiss.

When he backs up, he says, “You’re so beautiful, Bucky,” as he brushes his fingertips along Bucky’s arm, hands trembling a little as he touches the scarring, the skin, the metal. He leans forward and presses his lips to the space where metal and flesh connect, and Bucky inhales sharply.

“Was that okay?”

Bucky nods, going for the button on Steve’s khakis. “I’ve always forgotten how good you are,” says Bucky quietly, “always such a good person.”

“And you’re remembering this because I’m kissing you when you’re half naked?”

“I’m remembering,” says Bucky, pushing Steve’s pants down his hips, “because you didn’t react when I was half naked.”

“Oh,” gasps Steve as Bucky brushes a hand over Steve’s erection, “oh, I reacted.”

Bucky smirks at him and palms Steve’s cock through his underwear, biting his lip at the way Steve tilts his head back and moans. “That,” says Bucky, “I can tell.”

* * *

It’s kind of like a dream come true, watching Steve flush because of Bucky’s touch, watching Steve, innocent Steve, almost fall apart on the bed next to Bucky. Of course, it’s different, and the beard kind of keeps getting in the way, but it’s better than anything Bucky could have imagined.

Bucky runs a fingertip along the waistband of Steve’s underwear until he reaches the small of Steve’s back, his palm flattening against it.

“You okay there, Stevie?” he asks.

Steve nods. “I want you,” Steve blurts out, and it’s so genuine, so honest, so stupidly Steve that Bucky laughs, which isn’t supposed to be choked, but it is. “Sounds dumb, but I – I want you.”

Bucky nods, swallows hard, then does probably the least graceful thing he’s done in his life. He falls over and off of the bed when trying to get his pants off.

“You could have just asked for help,” says Steve, and the stupid, smug look on his face as he rests his chin in his hands on the bed makes Bucky want to throw him to the bed and fuck him until that expression disappears. The mental image makes Bucky’s breathing hitch for a brief moment.

“Lay down,” says Bucky, standing and shucking off his jeans and boxers. “And perhaps get those Iron Man underpants off. They were funny at the strip club, but here it’s kind of weird.”

“Right,” says Steve, blushing. His cock bobs out as he pushes the underwear down, and Bucky finds himself licking his lips at the sight. It’s hard to keep himself from surging forward and tasting, from finding out what Steve feels like, heavy and hard, in his mouth, but instead he leans forward to kiss Steve’s full pink lips again, something warm and heavy and wonderful settling in his heart when he feels Steve smile.

“You look good naked,” is apparently what Bucky’s brain has decided is the best thing to say next, and now Steve’s laughing and rolling his eyes.

“I thought you were the smooth one,” Steve says, stroking Bucky’s bottom lip with his thumb.

Bucky shrugs. “All for show. Had to impress my best guy.” He ducks his head, hiding his blush, but Steve tilts his head up and presses a kiss to his lips.

“You’re a dork,” says Steve fondly. Bucky leans down to kiss him, and the slight change in position slides their cocks together and –

“Oh, fuck,” Steve whines, gasping. “That’s new.”

And Bucky, as always, takes that as an invitation. “What’s new?” he asks.

“Everything,” sighs Steve. “It’s all – it’s all new.” His eyes flutter closed as Bucky slides against him. “But, uh, that. That in particular is very new.”

Bucky kisses Steve again, deliberately sliding against Steve. Steve makes a high pitched sort of whine again, and Bucky tries not to laugh. “Then you should tell me what you want,” says Bucky, kissing along Steve’s neck, “it’s all up to you.”

“I – I don’t know what…” Steve trails off, and Bucky studies his face. Steve avoids his eyes. “I kind of haven’t had time to learn… there have been aliens attacking, my computer’s a lot harder than I thought it would be… It takes a long time to figure out about what people – men, especially – what they do.”

“Usually a penis is involved,” says Bucky, and it has the desired effect, Steve laughing hard and smiling.

“I guessed that,” replies Steve when he calms a bit.

And that’s when he tentatively reaches down and wraps his hand around Bucky’s cock. It’s so sudden and so new and so good, that Bucky, who had been supporting himself on his hands, finds himself collapsing to his elbows and gasping.

“Is that right?” says Steve, like it’s another analytical battle scenario he can study. “What if I do this?”

He twists his hand in a way that makes Bucky wonder how much exactly Steve ended up googling. “Yes,” gasps Bucky, “fuck, I just – oh, god…”

Bucky takes the moment to reach down between them, wrapping his own fingers around Steve’s cock, and swallowing the low, deep moan Steve lets out in a hot, messy, wet kiss. Steve bucks into his grip, and Bucky takes his hand away for just a second.

Steve whimpers, but Bucky just locks eyes with him and licks his hand, slowly and thoroughly to slick it up, then returns to Steve’s cock.

Now Steve cries out, yelling something that sounds like either an obscenity or a fancy French word (or both, Bucky’s still not quite used to expletives in the new century) as Bucky slides his fist up and down. Steve’s hand falls from Bucky’s cock, so Bucky takes the moment.

He lets go, just for a second, and kisses Steve firmly. Steve’s fingers grip into his hair, his hips sliding against Bucky’s until their cocks are rubbing right up against each other. Steve’s beard scratches at Bucky’s cheeks, rough but good in a weird way. Bucky almost forgets about what he was planning to do, it all feels so good, but he forces himself to think of his plan.

“Hold on,” he gasps, “just – one second.”

Steve breaks away and nods, cheeks red and flushed and god, he’s beautiful.

Bucky begins kissing down Steve’s chest. “If anything’s not what you want,” says Bucky carefully, “let me know, and I’ll stop.”

“I don’t think I ever want you to stop,” says Steve, and it sends something hot and fierce into the pit of Bucky’s stomach.

Bucky slowly kisses and licks and bites his way down Steve’s torso, teasing and slow, and Steve’s begging, pleading, is almost more than he can handle.

“Come on, Buck,” Steve gasps, his hips twisting and writhing to try to find some sort of friction. “Come on, please.”

“I’m getting there,” says Bucky, “just be patient.”

“Patient my ass,” Steve says, “I’ve waited for this for ninety years.”

“Then you can wait a little longer.”

Bucky can basically hear Steve rolling his eyes.

“Fine,” says Bucky, and he prepares himself for a second because, honestly, for all the shit he talks, he’s never actually blown a guy before.

But he’s always wanted to.

He carefully wraps his lips around the head, and Steve lets out a string of expletives in multiple languages – Bucky counts mostly English, but there’s definitely Russian, German, and French in there – in a desperate whine.

Bucky looks up at him, through his eyelashes, and Steve just drops his head back toward the pillows. “Oh, fuck,” moans Steve, and Bucky’s thinking moaning, desperate Steve might be the best Steve he’s ever seen.

Bucky keeps working at Steve’s cock, a little sloppy and he’s trying to keep focused on covering his teeth and keeping it slick and wet, but it seems to be doing it for Steve when Bucky lets go and licks a stripe up the underside of his cock, pressing the flat of his tongue to a spot right beneath the head. Steve’s hands fly to Bucky’s hair and anchor themselves there, brushing against Bucky’s scalp in a way that’s almost too good to concentrate.

He keeps going, and, as he flicks his tongue over the slit, Steve pulls his hair and cries, “Bucky, I’m gonna, oh, god, I’m so close.”

It’s a split second decision, but it’s Steve, so Bucky doesn’t move his head. He tries bobbing his head quickly like he’s seen girls do until Steve’s coming down his throat, hot and wet and a little sudden. Steve pants and gasps his name like a prayer, and it’s a sound Bucky could hear over and over again and never get tired of. Bucky focuses on not choking and swallows him down, waiting until Steve’s done before he slides his mouth off of Steve with an obscene and wet pop.

“C’mere,” says Steve, and he uses all of that stupid supersoldier strength to haul Bucky bodily up the line of Steve’s body, and basically drops Bucky on his chest to kiss him. Bucky can feels Steve’s hands, broad and rough, brushing up and down Bucky’s back, and between that and the way Steve’s lazily rolling his hips in a way that catches Bucky’s cock between they’re stomach’s Bucky’s about to lose it.

“Please, Steve,” he gasps against Steve’s lips, and in an instant, he’s flipped onto his back and Steve’s sliding down his body. He’d be embarrassed about the almost begging, but he can’t exactly think right now, because Steve’s lips are all over his neck right now.

“I’ve never done anything like this before,” says Steve, “so I’m sorry if I’m not good.”

“You’ll be fine, just stop talking, okay?” Bucky rushes the words out in one breath, keeping himself from hyperventilating. He’s usually better at keeping his cool, but this is Steve and Steve’s bed, and Steve’s hand and, oh, fuck, Steve’s mouth.

That perfect, pink mouth is stretched around his cock, gentle and slow, and so fucking amazing that Bucky’s having trouble breathing.

Steve looks up at him, almost like he’s going to stop, so Bucky just says, “Please, keep going you’re perfect, god, your mouth is so good,” rambling like an idiot, but he can’t seem to stop himself. He just keeps going.

Eventually Steve gets into a rhythm, and uses his hands to press Bucky’s hips to the bed, which is an entirely new kind of hot and brings Bucky to the brink, just as Steve tries Bucky’s own trick on him, pressing his tongue to the underside.

“Steve,” Bucky gasps, “I’m – I’m gonna – ”

Steve works harder at him, and Bucky involuntarily tries to buck up into the heat, but the arms across his hips keep him still. It pushes him over the edge, and he comes with Steve’s name on his lips.

“You’re amazing,” Bucky gasps, “you’re perfect, you – Steve.” Because, really, in Bucky’s heart, perfection has always just been Steve.

Steve leans up and kisses him gently, carefully, but, for all of Bucky’s exhaustion, he’ll never give up a chance to kiss Steve hot and dirty, so he does.

He tastes himself on Steve’s tongue, a heavy taste that makes him whimper and press himself alongside Steve, their limbs tangling and weaving together.

Steve pulls back and stares at Bucky. “Hi,” he says gently, brushing a lock of hair from Bucky’s eyes.

“Hey,” Bucky says back. He probably has the same stupid smile on his face that Steve does.

They stare at each other like lovestruck teenagers for a while, when Steve’s eyes slowly drift closed and he reaches out to pull Bucky in his arms. Bucky snuggles backward into Steve’s embrace. He’d never admit it, but he kind of likes being the little one, the one Steve can curl himself around.

Steve presses a kiss to Bucky’s hair. “You’re sleeping here tonight,” he says, “and then tomorrow we can do more superhero stuff and shower together. Sound good?”

Bucky nods and snuggles back against Steve. Then something comes to the front of his mind, something sharp and brilliantly bright. “I love you,” he says quietly.

Steve’s arms pull him even closer, grip him tight, and he feels Steve press a kiss to his nice. “I’ve always loved you,” he murmurs in Bucky’s ear, a pleasant vibration that sends a shiver down Bucky’s spine. “Jerk.”

Bucky turns just enough to press a kiss to Steve’s lips. “Punk.”

* * *

“Rise and shine, people, you – wow, you are extremely naked.”

Steve blinks himself awake to see, oh Christ, to see Tony Stark with his eyes bugged out staring at his and Bucky’s forms under the comforter Bucky must have pulled over them during the night.

Then it registers: Tony Stark just walked into Steve’s bedroom, where he is lying curled around Bucky.

Oh dear.         

“As opposed to mildly naked, Stark?” Bucky asks, his voice low and groggy from sleep and, oh, wow, and other things. He looks well fucked and a mess, even after sleep, and it sends something wonderful through Steve’s body. “Get out of my room.”

“It’s not your room,” says Tony, not even having the decency to cover his eyes. Steve kind of hates him for it. “It’s actually Steve’s room.”

“And Steve says get your iron ass out of here before he kicks it,” grumbles Steve. “C’mon, Stark, I’m tired.”

“First of all,” says Tony, “I appreciate the iron ass comment, I’ve been working on my glutes. Glad you noticed. Second of all, I only barge into your love nest of sin and debauchery because Coulson’s apparently been calling you two fools for hours and neither of you has picked up. Something about the mission you two are running.”

Steve frowns. “What time is it?”

“Eleven forty – ” Tony steals a glance at his watch, “eight.”

Bucky sits up rapidly. “We had a meeting at ten,” he whines. “Oh, they’re going to kill us.”

“Probably,” adds Tony, and Steve and Bucky use pillows to pelt him out of the room as he yells, “Good work, Sarge, keep Cap up to fitness!”

Steve shoves Bucky out of his room, demanding that he, “Get some clothes on so I don’t get tempted to throw you back on the bed,” and Steve pulls on the first few things he can find, and bolts out of his door.

Sure enough, his cell phone is sitting on the counter, next to his jacket. The red light in the corner is blinking quickly. Yeah, he’s missed a lot of messages.

Bucky saunters in after him, a coat thrown over his shoulder.

“You might want to brush you hair,” says Steve, and he stops himself from running his fingertips through it.

And then he realizes he can. So he does. Bucky leans into the touch. “You seem to be doing just fine a job of it,” he says, smiling. “But I understand. It’s a mess. Probably because somebody fucked me well and good last night. Did I mention that?”

“Oh, you didn’t have to,” says Steve, and he can tell he’s blushing. Bucky rolls his eyes and pulls Steve to his chest, holding him close. Steve presses a kiss to his forehead.

“You know,” Steve says as Bucky angles his head upward to kiss his lips, “if we don’t head out soon, Coulson’s gonna kill us. Probably dead this time.”

“I’d make a comment,” says Steve, “but you, me, and Coulson are probably the most familiar with being dead multiple times on this planet, so I’ll keep my trap shut.”

Bucky smiles and kisses Steve, but Tony screams from the hallway, “Stop macking on each other and get to HQ before I get JARVIS in on you two!”

* * *

Steve’s immediate response is that Coulson looks a little too smug for a meeting about a misson. “Director Coulson,” he says carefully. “Care to explain the expression?”

“You two both have sex hair,” he says like he’s describing the weather. “Natasha told us what went down last night.”

“Traitor,” says Bucky, but there’s a sort of grin on his face.

“And Sam over here,” interjects said Sam, looking at them like he can’t decide whether to kick them or kiss them, “is still pretty pissed that you two idiots took off while he was onstage to make the big bust of the night. Seriously, dudes?”

“I thought we finished with this last night,” says Cap.

“We sure finished something.”

Steve goes red. “Shut up, Bucky.”

“Not what you said last night.”

“Can we not while I’m in the room?” says Sam, looking pained.

“And as much as thirteen year old me loved hearing about you two in history class,” says a pretty dark haired girl in the corner, “she’s kind of on the clock right now and I have another project to get on.”

Steve turns to her, clearing his throat. “I apologize, miss, but we haven’t been introduced.”

“We haven’t,” she replies. “Thanks for that, Coulson. I’m Skye.” She holds out a hand and Steve shakes it. He’s expecting delicate, but she’s got a firm grip that makes him hope he never gets on her bad side. She leans across him to shake Bucky’s hand, and, wait, was that a wink?

He’d yell at Bucky for that one later.

“Now that we’ve got the delicate and respectful and decidedly not winky introductions complete,” says Skye, giving Bucky a ridiculous, overdone wink in his direction, “I’ve got bugs for you guys.”

“Bugs?” asks Steve. “Like…biological warfare?”

Natasha groans. “Goddamnit, Steve, I bet on you for this one.” She slides a ten over to Skye, who pockets it.

“I know that there’s technological bugs!” he groans. “We worked with them in WWII – we just don’t really use them anymore.” He frowns. “Do we?”

“Of course we do,” says Natasha. “Your house.”

“I thought that was a Hydra thing,” says Steve. “We still spy on people? Our people?”

“We,” interrupts Coulson, “are bugging a human trafficker’s office that doubles as a strip club. That hardly counts as our people.”

“And I’ll take that money back now,” says Natasha. Skye does so, but reluctantly.

“Can people stop betting on me not knowing things?” Steve asks. “I assumed biological bugs because of our close proximity, like drugging them or something.”

“I believe you, Steve,” says Bucky, clapping him on the shoulder. “Can we get back to the point? What are we doing with these bugs?”

“I designed them specifically to not only record conversations, but simultaneously analyze the vocal patterns and compare them with any voices that are on record,” says Skye. “And, yeah, we’re tapping phones and that kind of thing, but that’s only in an emergency. Or when the Fridge is broken into and we’re about to discover that Ward is a big pile of –”

“Thank you, Skye,” interrupts Coulson. Steve’s, despite the fact, is fairly sure he knows where this discussion is going. Former agent Grant Ward wasn’t pleasant when Steve went in to question him briefly, a mission before finding Bucky. He was even less pleasant when Steve called him every synonym for traitor in every language he knew.

“So, what,” asks Sam. “We’re just going to plant them all over the place and hope someone doesn’t knock them off or get them stuck to their tear off Velcro?” He shrugs at the confused expressions on Natasha, Skye, and Coulson’s faces. “That shit happens all the time,” Sam adds seriously. “I almost lost an eye ripping off my pants and having a button get caught.”

“Now that’s something I’d like to see,” mumbles Skye with an appreciative glance in Sam’s direction, but it’s so quiet that he’s not sure people without superhuman enhancements could hear it.

Which means, naturally, everyone in the room but Sam got a big old earful.

“Why’s Barnes laughing?” asks Sam. “Never mind, don’t tell me. Look, how many do we have?”

“We have three,” says Skye.

“That’s hardly enough – ” Steve begins, but he falters when the very small, very innocent looking hacker gives him a glare like she’s ready to tackle him to the floor.

“That’s all I have right now,” she says firmly and sternly. “If you want more, contact me and Fitz in about, say, eight weeks? Because that’s when we can develop this a second time and get the right materials together.”

Coulson nods. “They’re a good team, but they’re not capable of manufacturing the necessary data from thin air. Especially now with our more underground scenario. I expect the three of you will each be briefed on how to use these items, right, Agent Skye?”

She nods. “Natasha’s getting a slightly different model – face scan-and-match I designed. Runs through all public photographs to see if we can find out data on that person from the internet, be able to take them down faster.”

Natasha frowns. “That technology sounds damned familiar,” she says, and Steve recognizes the tone as serious and a little intimidating.

Skye, though looking a little scared (how come she never looked scared of Steve?), stands her ground. “I know what you’re thinking,” says Skye carefully, “but the algorithm was an incredible advancement.”

“What, we’re using Hydra technology now?!” Bucky exclaims. “Wh-why?” And instead of looking furious, he looks hurt, looks a little broken, and Steve can’t help from taking his hand – his left hand- and brushing a thumb over Bucky’s. He hasn’t even had a chance to ask him if he could feel that yet.

He never spent time thinking enough about it.

“Bucky,” says Sam carefully, “look we – we’ve made some mistakes, as a country. I can admit that, I’m sure all of us can. But the least we can do is learn from them. I don’t know much about algorithms and that kind of thing, but I’m sure she does,” he nods over to Skye, “and if she’s Coulson’s right hand, and Natasha hasn’t killed her for existing inadequately yet, I think I can trust her.”

“I’m not his right hand,” Skye blurts out. “That’s May. I’m, like, his left foot. Or his nose. Something like that.”

“You’re certainly not his mouth,” says Bucky, but he chances a smile at her and she returns it. “You swear this isn’t going to hurt anybody? No leaks or viruses Hydra left in the system?”

“Please,” Skye replies, “I’ve been doing this for ages. No, I rerouted the system so it looked like it was uploading to the internet when it was really – ” She pauses as she realizes all the faces in the room are blank and a little lost. “Sorry,” she says. “Basically I did some hoop jumping and some fancy dancing and got us out of the mess you were worried about. No way for Hydra to get us now.” She grins in a way that reminds Steve awfully strongly of Bucky. “And they’d never expect us to use this on them.”

“I guess so,” says Bucky quietly. “I just don’t want to…Don’t…” He trails off.

“Hey,” says Steve, “hey, Buck, look at me.” And then it’s like there’s nobody else in the room for a second as Bucky turns to him, doubt and fear bleeding into his eyes, his mouth, his skin. “You’re you right now,” he says quietly, “you’ve been you for a while, okay? And I don’t care what you think’s gonna happen, but you’re staying you. I’m sure of it. None of this will get in your head, okay?”

Bucky bites his lip, nervous and it makes him look so much younger, that uncertainty. Finally, after a moment of pause and hesitation, he nods. “Got it,” he says carefully. “I – I got you this time.”

“Til the end of the line,” says Steve, allowing a little smile.

“Is this what you two deal with every day?” comes a voice, and Steve realizes it’s Skye, and also, suddenly, remembers he was in a room with a bunch of secret agents, and that he is a full blown buffoon sometimes. “Because, wow, that’s some romance. But it’s kind of pukey cute, if you get what I’m saying.”

“Yeah,” says Sam.

“We get what you’re saying,” adds Natasha.

“Back to business, ladies and gentlesoldiers,” says Coulson. “About those bugs.”

* * *

Bucky didn’t want to fully admit it in front of everyone, but Steve knows him annoyingly well and he’ll apparently never let anything go for the rest of Bucky’s life. Which, frankly, Bucky kind of appreciates.

But Bucky is worried, and he stays worried until that Saturday night when it’s busy and cramped in the club, and he and Steve are getting ready.

He leans a little too far into Steve’s hand when he holds his face steady to apply the eyeliner.

“Hey,” says Steve, studying Bucky’s face. Bucky tries to avoid eye contact, but realizes a beat too late that doing so definitely gives it away. All that assassin/spy training kind of goes right out the window when it comes to Steve Rogers. “You’re going to stay you,” he says firmly. “And these bugs aren’t connected to any frequency they’ve ever suspected might have been even slightly connected to you. And plus,” says Steve, risking a brush of his lips over Bucky’s forehead, “it’ll take a lot more than that for you to ever get away from me again.”

Bucky closes his eyes and smiles, because if anyone could make him feel like less of a robot, it’s Steve Rogers and that easy, honest smile that sends warmth through him, and the gentle touch of his rough hands that are so much bigger yet still so much like the hands Bucky knew when they were children.

“I know,” says Bucky. “I just – I get worried.” He sighs. “I never want to be stuck back there again. I want to stay me.”

“So do I,” says Steve, shrugging his shoulders. “That’s normal. I’m just here to tell you that, despite the fact that you are worried, I’m here to help you out with that.”

“You’re a punk,” says Bucky. “What do you think you’re doing, taking care of me?”

“You did that for over two decades, Buck, for me,” says Steve, working on the eyeliner, “about time I helped you out on that end.”

Bucky’s angling his lips for a kiss, but the second their lips touch, they hear someone barge in and they leap apart.

“Boys!” says Wayland. “Good to see you two still in that happy honeymoon stage. Normally if you’re a stripper fucking a stripper shit gets weird. Glad you two are okay with it.” She eyes them. “Can I see the two of you in my office, before the show?”

Bucky’s hoping to god that Wayland’s a little less observant than he is, because he sees Steve’s fingertips flicker to the pocket sewn into his briefs (yeah, they had to sew a pocket in to keep the bug safe – Bucky laughed at that for an hour) just for the briefest of seconds.

Then again, not knowing it was the big, somebody might think he was just going for his crotch. Which, frankly, no one could blame him for.

Bucky then realizes he has been out of the conversation for a good thirty seconds thinking about Steve and his cock, and refocuses on the situation.

“It won’t be long, Sebastian,” says Wayland. “Just a few minutes to discuss your futures in this establishment. Probation time’s almost up for you two, so it’ll be nice to get your parts secured.”

They follow her into the room, and Steve looks around a little bit, appearing interested, but definitely scouting for spots to hide the bug.

Bucky spots a perfect area, just beneath where about three pieces of her desk join together, but he can’t say anything to Steve about it.

“Let’s cut to the chase,” says Wayland. “Sebastian, you’ve got your solo bit. That I’m sold on – you don’t need to worry about it. But I’m thinking of throwing a weekly special for the two of you, if you’re up for it.”

Steve frowns. “Weekly special?” he asks. “What do you mean?”

“It’s going to get old, fast, if every single night you help Christopher out with his part. I mean, you’ve gotten better, Christopher,” she turns to Steve. “But I’m not sure we can keep you dancing awkwardly around the stage while Seb over here does all the work, you know?”

“I’m sorry,” says Steve, frowning. “I’m, um – I’m working on it?”

“Don’t be,” says Wayland. “I’m thinking about having you two do that little bit you did last night – where Sebastian helps you figure out what to do, guides you through it, that kind of thing, once a week. Big deal – probably Thursday nights, that’s when all the college girls show up, anyway. We’ll promo it and everything. And,” she pauses, eyeing Bucky and Steve, “if you’re up for it, you guys can make out onstage, do whatever you want as long as dicks don’t actually get out.” She shrugs. “We’re a sleazy place, but not quite that sleazy.”

Bucky immediately tenses. The idea of showing this new part of his relationship with Steve to others feels wrong, but what worries him more is that it kind of turns him on. Knowing Steve’ll be out there, acting the innocent when Bucky knows full well what that mouth is capable of doing, while Bucky guides him through the moves.

But it means Steve’s only here once a night, which could put a serious damper in the mission. Bucky moves to fix it, but he’s interrupted by Steve leaning forward, his eyes on Wayland.

“I’ll agree to it if Seb agrees,” he says firmly, “but can I still stay on as the, um, can I help him and Adam and anybody else with makeup? As a backup?”

She stares at him. “I was joking about that when you first started here,” she says. “You’re good, but you’re good in comparison to him.” She gestures to Bucky with her thumb. “And, no offense, Seb, but that’s not a hard thing to do.”

That’s when Steve grins, a little sinfully, a little too much of last night in those eyes. Steve slowly moves his hand to grip Bucky’s thigh, rubbing circles around Bucky’s thigh, so high up Bucky’s thigh and, oh, fuck. Bucky swallows and immediately thinks of Director Coulson in a toga. “Can I come in to keep an eye on my guy, then?” he asks, deep and sultry.

Wayland rolls her eyes. “Look, that kind of seduction technique might work on him, but I have plenty of boys like you giving me those same looks every day. I get that you want to stay here and,” she uses air quotes, “ keep an eye on’ him, but, I gotta say, it’s fuckin’ ridiculous to keep you here full time when you’re just not at the level I expect of my dancers.” She shrugs. “Maybe in a couple of weeks, we’ll reconsider. But for now, you can be the innocent little nerd who needs to get dirtied up by the rockstar, okay?”

Steve sighs, and nods. “I understand. I’ll see what I can do about getting dirtied up.” And then he winks. Steve Rogers, who couldn’t so much as look at a woman without stumbling in the 40’s actually winks at a woman.

There’s a lot of things that have changed about Steve Rogers that Bucky missed. Apparently number one is his flirting ability.

Or maybe that’s just something that’s changed since last night.

They leave the room without another word and walk outside.

“That was brutal,” says Bucky, “look, Steve, I don’t know what she’s seeing, but your striptease last night was almost coordinated.”

Steve whacks his metal arm gently, and suddenly Bucky feels like he’s being minimally electrocuted, a sensation similar to sticking his finger in the wrong bit of a lamp. Which he has certainly not done, and certainly not done twice.

“What the fuck?” he snaps, jumping a foot and a half. Still feeling like he’s buzzing, he reaches over and grips the spot, pulling off a bug. “Wait, what…?” He reaches down to the pouch that was attached to the inside of his pants. “Shit, Steve,” he says, and he looks up at Steve with horror in his eyes. “Steve, my bug’s gone. Is that? Did you?”

Steve gives him a sly little grin. “You think I felt you up in there just for show?” he says. “There was a purpose to the groping, Mr. Barnes. That bug on your arm’s mine. I grabbed yours when we were in the meeting, stuck it in the little spot under the desk where a bunch of pieces of wood connect. I was thinking we could keep that one there, and –”

Bucky surges up and kisses him, using his metal arm (which has now stopped twitching uncontrollably, which is nice) to drag Steve’s lips down to his. “You stupid genius,” he murmurs.

“Oxymoron,” says Steve.

“You two are the morons,” says Sam. “Sebastian, you’re in in, like, five minutes. Get ready so I don’t have to wipe the floor with both of you idiots instead of just Steve.”

“I’m getting better!” exclaims Steve.

Bucky shrugs. “He is,” says Bucky. “But maybe only for me.”


	3. Step 3: Decimate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We come to the end! Fitting to post on Cap's birthday, is it not? I hope you have enjoyed this story, and I cannot express how much the feedback has warmed my heart.

The night goes by quickly. Not much happens that should concern any of them, especially since it’s pretty quiet for a Friday night. So Steve actually breaks out some of his moves that worked on Bucky the night before, and gets encouraged when he sees Natasha throw him a thumbs up and a grin from the check in counter.

Bucky, as always, comes out in the middle of his set, but instead of helping him, he says some really ridiculous things about how his apprentice has learned a lot, and Steve has to bite his tongue to keep from laughing hysterically, because Bucky’s kind of an idiot sometimes and Steve loves him kind of always.

Sam goes on and steals the damned show, his firefighter’s uniform getting peeled off by a beautiful woman with dark hair and dark brown eyes. Steve has to muffle his laughter into Bucky’s shoulder as Sam lets out a completely ridiculous whoop.

“He’s insane,” says Bucky, sounding awed, “completely, irrevocably insane. I’m surprised he didn’t just jump me on that stupid fucking helicarrier ages ago.”

“He did,” says Steve, “or, at least, he tried to. You ripped his wing off before he could get a chance.”

“Good for him,” says Bucky, but he still sounds a little confused and a little more awed, and it’s an expression and tone that Steve kind of likes on Bucky.

They end their night with Steve getting a bra thrown on his head and staring at it like it’s a grenade, and then Bucky snatching it from him and putting it on. Steve chooses not to even consider asking how Bucky figured out all those clasps and straps.

“What do you say, boys?” asks Wayland. “Good night?”

“Yeah, it was,” says Sam. “Did you see that girl? Pulled off the jacket in one go. Nobody gets the snaps the first time like that.” He deliberately gives Steve a look.

“Okay, those were buttons, and you know it,” says Steve. “But I’m wiped. I’m ready to head home.”

“Me too,” says Bucky. “But I have to hit the, uh, men’s room for a moment. Wait for me?”

“Always,” is Steve’s first response, and he doesn’t realize how ridiculous it sounds – Bucky’s going to the BATHROOM, not to the moon – until Sam doubles over laughing and Wayland gives him a look like she’s considering a big old firing or slapping him on the head.

“I am never going to live that one down, am I?” asks Steve.

“No way in hell,” says Sam. “Come on, man. Pack up your shit so we can get out of here before two am, yeah?”

Steve collects his things and throws them in the little bag he’s been using to carry all of his costuming for the past few weeks.

It’s weird to think about, but NOT being Captain America for a handful of days has been a nice experience. Sure, he still looks the part, but the stigma and the history isn’t there.

He doesn’t half wonder if Bucky feels the same way.

“Quit it with that look,” says Sam, throwing Steve’s jacket at him. “You look like a lost puppy.”

“He basically is a lost puppy,” says Bucky, and he looks like a different person as he walks out of the bathroom. He’s rinsed out his hair, the gel and glitter gone, and changed into a simple pair of jeans and a teeshirt. “Steve, you’re ogling me again.”

“He’s always ogling you,” says Sam.

They walk to the front desk, where Natasha is sitting with her legs folded, a book in her lap that she swiftly hides away when the three of them walk toward her.

“Hello, boys,” she says. “Have a good evening?”

Sam shoots her a grin. “Always. You up for keeping the night going?”

“Actually,” says Steve. “I have a better idea that doesn’t involve me needing to wear shoes.”

* * *

Steve insists that Sam and Natasha come visit them for a drink or two back at the apartment he shares with Bucky, but when they walk into the room, the look on Sam’s face is startled and fairly hilarious.

“Holy hell,” he says, looking around. “Why are there clothes everywhere?”

Steve swallows and rubs the back of his neck. “We, uh…”

“We had sex on that counter,” says Bucky, gesturing to the counter Sam’s leaning against. Sam jolts away from it so fast it’s like he was pushed. “Nah, I’m just fucking with you. But that is why our clothes are all over the place.”

“Old people are weird,” says Sam, but Natasha just laughs and gives them a knowing look.

“Young people are weird,” she corrects him, but he glares, and they start on their standard argument about the fact that she’s not even a month older than he is, and that she has no leg to stand on when it comes to age.

Steve just lets them keep flirting and smiles shyly at Bucky, feeling oddly vulnerable now that they’re back into the apartment where so much had happened the night before.

“Hi,” he says.

“Hello.” Bucky kisses him lightly, lips just gently brushing Steve’s.

“Quit it!” shouts Sam. “God, you know, they’re even like this back stage. It’s appalling.”

“I think it’s kind of sweet,” says Natasha. “I love it when old people find love.”

“You can’t play the old card and the young card,” Sam says with a shake of his head. “That’s not – no. That’s not allowed.”

“I can if I want to.”

“You cannot.”

Natasha’s clearly holding back a smile, and this is how Steve loves her best. Give her even the smallest of missions, and she’s hard focused on that until it’s done. But when it has nothing to do with this part of the mission, when they’re close to being done, when it’s almost over.

Well, she loosens up a little. And it’s nice.

“You boys are so easy to rile up,” she says with a sigh. “Anyway, are we going to stand in the kitchen all night or are we relocating to the couches?”

Bucky throws himself onto the couch backward, doing a twist as he falls to land sitting. Steve, despite what others may think, isn’t stupid enough to try that when he knows he’ll just mess it up, so he makes a show of walking around the couch and sitting next to Bucky.

“See?” he says. “Furniture. Walking around it. It’s not a jungle gym.”

Bucky scowls at Steve and launches at him, sitting on Steve’s chest until Steve apologizes and laughs until Bucky gets off.

“Are you two secretly married or something?” asks Natasha. “I ask this only because you two are totally married.”

Steve looks over at Bucky, who is sitting with Steve’s legs in his lap, and shrugs. “I don’t remember getting married,” he says, very seriously. “Buck, did we get married?”

“Sure did,” Bucky replies, “1943. Colonel Phillips was my maid of honor. We had strippers at the bachelorette party and everything.”

Sam rolls his eyes. “Seriously though,” he asks. “What sparked this whole thing?”

“I looked at Steve naked and ripped his clothes off every night for a week,” says Bucky, deadpan. “Figured we’d take the next leap.”

“Or,” says Natasha, “you made out with him onstage, felt butterflies, and the two of you made like little superheroes and got busy.”

Bucky gasps and puts his hand over his heart. “I’ll have you all know,” he says, his voice dramatic and high, “I’ll put out for nothing less than a ring!”

“Yeah, right,” scoffs Steve, and Sam laughs so hard he hits his head on the back of the chair.

* * *

Their night is easy and it ends a little later than Steve’s nights usually end, with a tipsy Sam reenacting one particularly interesting test flight when he divebombed into a group of ladies sunning themselves by the pool.

Bucky and Steve collapse into Steve’s bed, curled around each other, around three in the morning, and something warms Bucky’s heart to realize that Steve never for a second seemed to consider asking Bucky to sleep in his own bed.

They wake up the next morning, to the intended alarm without any mix ups this time, and groggily make themselves breakfast.

Steve’s swearing at their Keurig for the millionth time that week over its shitty coffee when he gets a phone call.

It’s a surprising one.

Steve holds the phone up to face Bucky. “Bucky,” he says slowly, “the mission’s almost over.”

“Shit,” replies Bucky, cramming more peanut butter in his mouth, “we fuck up?” He tips his head back. “Jesus, that must have been why Wayland called us in yesterday.”

Steve shakes his head, grinning a little. “Actually,” he says, “not at all. Remember that bug I planted in Lady Wayland’s room?”

Bucky nods. “Which one, the one on her desk, or the one that one that nearly electrocuted me when you stuck it on my arm without letting me know?” Bucky rolls his eyes. “Yeah. I know which one.”

“Well,” says Steve, pointedly ignoring Bucky’s comment, “apparently, it picked something up from a little further away. It seems like that secondary room that you found, that weird thing that didn’t show up on any blueprints but stuck out…It’s some type of transport area. They were talking about some girls they had, stuff like that.”

“We got ‘em,” says Bucky, sitting on the kitchen counter, eyes all lit up behind the eye liner he hasn’t managed to wipe off. “Damn, we did it. They’re – we…Damn.”

“Eloquent as always, Buck,” says Steve with a grin. He leans forward and cages Bucky on the counter, “but for the rest of the day we’re on call,” he nudges at Bucky’s neck with his nose, and Bucky drops his neck to the slide, letting his eyes flutter closed, “so we really shouldn’t go anywhere,” Bucky whines a little bit as he feels Steve’s lips just barely kiss at his jawline, “so we’ll have to come up with something to do while we’re bored, in our apartment. Alone.”

“I’ve got a few ideas,” says Bucky, and he intended for it to seem equally light as Steve was sounding, but, nope, it sounds gasping and breathless even to his own ears. Stupid Steve.

“Oh yeah?” Steve closes his eyes and kisses Bucky gently and, wow, just, wow, just…How he went his whole life before now, ninety whatever years, without doing this, without kissing Steve is unfathomable. Even the littlest of kisses makes him feel like the time Jim dropped a box of rations on his head, seeing stars and an acute sense of dizziness that fades slowly.

It’s awesome.

Bucky pulls Steve a little closer, wrapping his legs around Steve’s waist and moving Steve’s arms to loop around Bucky’s hips and shoulders, except, nope.

“What are you doing?” Steve says, laughing against Bucky’s lips. “What, are my hands hugging the blender behind you too?”

“Poorly executed maneuver,” Bucky replies, “I didn’t realize how far back I was.”

“Oh, blender,” says Steve, pushing Bucky to the side (and halfway into the sink). He grabs the blender and caresses it, and Bucky snorts. “Blender, I’ve waited so long for your metal glory.”

“You have metal glory right here,” says Bucky wiggling his left hand with a smirk, and he dies laughing at Steve’s expression.

“Get over here,” Steve says, and it’s low and deep and hot and, oh god, how the hell did Bucky fight this for so long?

Apparently Bucky was taking too much time, because Steve grabs him by the thighs and drags him across the counter to kiss him. Bucky can’t hold back a moan as Steve slides his lips along Bucky’s jaw and reaches down to push up Bucky’s shirt. Steve’s hands are warm and big, calloused fingertips just grazing against Bucky’s abs and, god, this is good.

Bucky gasps as Steve’s hands pull his shirt off, and he grins as Steve just stares at him.

“You’re looking at me like you want to eat me alive,” Bucky laughs. Okay, it’s a giggle. “Kinda like some of the ladies at the club who are into Sebastian the Rockstar.”

Steve frowns. “I don’t want to look at you like that,” he says. “I – you’re…” Steve, Bucky has discovered, has not changed a bit since his stupid just, noble days. Steve closes his eyes like he’s steadying himself, and –

Oh boy. Oh, wow. Oh boy. He knows that look.

He’s a little afraid of that look.

“I think I’ve kind of loved you since I was a kid. I…I don’t want you to think of me as one of the ladies just liking your abs or something. I want you, Bucky. Not just how you look.”

Bucky just kind of stares at him because, duh, he knows this. “They should call you Captain Obvious instead of Captain America,” is Bucky’s brilliant response.

Steve’s chuckle is light and honest. “You’re a jerk,” says Steve, smiling fondly.

“And you, good Captain, are a punk who should kiss me now.”

Steve does just that.

Hands are everywhere – Bucky puts his in Steve’s hair, pulling just a little bit, and somewhere in the back of his mind he catalogues the way it makes Steve moan and pull Bucky even closer.

Bucky wraps himself around Steve until the punk gets the hint and picks him up, and carries him to Steve’s bedroom.

And promptly drops him right on the covers.

“Well that was indelicate,” says Bucky. “Come on, aren’t you going to lay me on the bed? The public would be shocked at the brashness of the noble Captain America.” He puts on his best impression of Steve’s _Captain America is Disappointed In You_ look and shakes his finger. “The public would be horrified to know how indelicately you treat your bed partners.”

“I’m Steve Rogers with you,” says Steve, crawling on top of him and pressing him down on the bed, “which means I’m nothing but a scrappy little brat from Brooklyn.”

Bucky runs his arms up Steve’s strong arms, along his strong back, “I wouldn’t say little,” Bucky murmurs, and to punctuate his meaning, rolls his body along Steve’s to press their bodies together. “So are you gonna go for this, Rogers, or do I have to wait another ninety years?”

Steve laughs, low and deep. Bucky can feel the vibration in Steve’s chest. “Do you really think I want to wait?”

And as Steve starts kissing down Bucky’s chest and muttering comments of varying indecency as he descends, Bucky prepares themselves for the marathon supersoldier sex they’re going to have.

Or they would have, if Steve’s phone didn’t buzz through his sweatpants right on top of Bucky’s cock and, fuck, that was quite possibly the weirdest thing Bucky’s ever felt in his life.

“Jesus!” squeaks Bucky. “Oh, god, that could not have felt more wrong.”

Steve whips out his phone and shoots him an apologetic look. “Captain Rogers,” Steve says into the phone. There’s a bunch of comments like, “Really?” and “Now?” and “I never thought that,” as Bucky waits for Steve on the bed, playing with his metal arm to entertain himself. Occasionally he hits a trigger he had forgotten about and ends up dangling from his arm where a grappling hook had shot out and hooked on the ceiling. Other times he gets a couple of utensils from his fingertips.

The arm was weird.

“The transfer’s today,” says Steve with a deep sigh. “I told them we couldn’t wait until they transport the next group of women, which means we need to suit up.”

Bucky, he admits, pouts like a six year old denied ice cream. “But you we were gonna – ”“Oh, quit it with that pouting,” says Steve, and kisses Bucky lightly. “Come on. We have people to save. And maybe tonight we can have some victory sex later?”

Bucky laughs. “Did you just say victory sex?” he snorts. “What are you, a sixteen year old quarterback banging his girlfriend?”

“No,” says Steve, “I’d rather consider it the quarterback sleeping with the gloomy, angst ridden punk who everyone thinks is hot but no one talks to.”

“You jackass,” laughs Bucky. “Come on, Cap. Let’s get in those uniforms.”

Bucky darts into his bedroom, pulling on the dark getup and necessary weaponry for the mission. He’s familiar with the place, so there’s no need to study blueprints.

He blinks, steadies himself, and lets that part of him rise to the surface, the part that he so often tries to hide. It’s the part of him that’s truly The Winter Soldier, the part of him that is cold, calculating, focused on the mission. Able to discern specific details from broader concepts. Capable of brutal violence and tactical destruction.

It scares him, a bit, that he can do this, that the Winter Soldier may just always be lurking behind his eyes.

For the first few weeks of being back, his greatest fear was himself. He lashed out, he attacked. He hurt. He hurt himself, he hurt other people, and he hurt inside, in his head. There was a constant thrumming of StevemissionStevemissionfailureSteve that counteracted with a lot of the methods given to bring him back. Sometimes he couldn’t hear over the screaming in his head that told him he wasn’t doing the right thing, that his mark was still out there, that he failed his mission.

It took a long that to realize he could choose things for himself again.

His favorite choice, so far, was Steve. It’ll always be Steve, but it was so much more that he got to choose Steve, and that Steve chose him back. Even before they kissed, Steve had always chosen him – chosen to find him, despite the Winter Soldier’s deadly programming.

Eventually, he learned to take those times and reconfigure them, make it so he was always himself and the Winter Soldier was a part to ignore.

But in times like these, he allows himself to regain some of the skills the Winter Soldier had; the ability sense fear, to sense bravery. To sense when someone would back down and when someone would have to be forced down.

“Bucky?” calls Steve. “You alright in there?”

Bucky clears his throat and swings his arm, a habit left over from the pre-Stark model arm that he always had to do to reconfigure the arm. This new one’s better, feels more and feels human, but it’s hard to break a seventy year old habit.

“I’m good,” says Bucky. “Let’s go take those fuckers down.”

Steve nods, curt and professional in his modified, less glitzy Cap uniform designed for missions like this, and opens the door for Bucky like Bucky’d done for the dames.

“A gentleman” Bucky says with a smirk. “How kind.”

“Get gone,” Steve replies, and they make their way to SHIELD headquarters silently, concentrating on the mission.

“You ready for this?” asks Natasha when they arrive, already decked out in her widow gear and looking fierce as all hell.

Steve nods. “I’ve thought of better ways to spend Thursdays, but this will do.”

Bucky shrugs. “Way to kill a couple of hours.”

“You three could be more professional,” comes Sam’s grumbling voice, and the expression on his face makes everyone pause. “Oh, shut up.”

“Why,” says Bucky calmly and carefully, “are you wearing a Superman costume in the middle of SHIELD headquarters?”

Sam groans and drops his head into his hands. “I’m the cover,” he says. “I’m supposed to walk in there and,” here, Sam begins using some bizarre hand gestures, “show Wayland and everybody my new moves.” He frowns. “Then once Wayland tries to duck out, saying she’s got something to do or whatever, I press a button and SHIELD agents and you three come running.”

“Two,” says Natasha. “I’m sneaking in to take out guards.” She flashes Steve and Bucky a winning smile. “I get the fun part.”

“Yeah,” says Sam. “Lucky you three and your supersoldier and superspy skills. All I got are the wings.”

“And a body to die for,” adds Bucky, and Steve snorts so hard he trips over Sam’s Superman cape and collides with Bucky.

“And we depend on you three to save the world on a regular basis,” says Natasha, and the eye roll is the best Bucky’s ever seen.

“We move out, when?”

“My meeting with her is as 12:30.”

“Didn’t Coulson say the move was scheduled for two?” Steve asks.

Sam just stares at him. “Again, I don’t want to talk about how long I’m stuck in this costume for. I do want to talk about how you all suck. And that’s the latest she would do it.”

Bucky opens his mouth to let out a string of horribly inappropriate sucking related comments about Steve, but Steve claps a hand over Bucky’s mouth, gives him the _Captain America is Disappointed In You_ look, and shakes his head. “Can it, Buck.”

Bucky pouts beneath the hand, then licks to make Steve move it.

He doesn’t. “Bucky, are you licking my hand?”

Bucky mumbles, “Yes,” and then licks his hand again.

Steve moves his hand and wipes it on Bucky’s shirt, who shuffles away and laughs, trying to get back at Steve by licking him on his face.

Then Bucky suddenly realizes the venue he’s licking Steve in and pauses.

Natasha’s giving the two of them a look like she’s about to simultaneously throw up and laugh.

Sam, on the other hand, looks like he's watching his parents canoodle. “Disgusting,” says Sam. “You two are disgusting."

* * *

It takes a little while, but they get on the road and Sam, on a wire, begins his interview and (Bucky’s not sure how it works) manages to keep the wire hidden when stripping down to Superman boxers and a cape. Sam fascinates him. The amount of wires required for this job to transmit the signals effectively made Bucky think long and hard about how the hell they would be set up to effectively work when you’re naked.

Bucky distracts himself with very strange things when he’s bored out of his mind. He begins to shift to what Steve would look like in suit pretending to be a CEO, because that mental image is much more fun and gets even better when he thinks of himself as an intern.

“I have an idea,” says Natasha, at one thirty, after Sam has argued for the third time for a Christmas special of stripping Lord of the Rings-style elves (and, from the sounds, the third time he’s acted out an incredibly detailed routine.) She moves to dart out into the fray, without even finishing her sentence or explaining her idea, but Steve grabs her around the waist and pulls her back. Bucky’s used to this – or, at least, he was used to this when he was the Winter Soldier. It took a while, but eventually Natasha opened up to the fact that they had known each other in the Red Room, a brief and tumultuous connection that disappeared when he was found to be uncontrollable when allowed out of cryo without a mind wipe for more than a week.

According to Natasha, though, their time together gave her the means and motivation to find a way out.

Steve, however, might be used to Natasha’s ridiculous yet functional ideas, considering his awestruck recounting of the time he launched her off his shield onto alien aircycles, but isn’t accepting of them all the time. “No way,” he says, “not again. If you have an extra plan up your sleeve, you tell me about it and then you do it. No more of this going off and downloading intel only to get us half blown up bullshit.”

Natasha sighs, her eye roll just as impressive as the night before. “Fine,” she says. “What if I break into the club and take position early. It couldn’t hurt to have operatives inside the location before anything happens.”

“She’s right, Rogers,” comes Coulson’s voice over the coms. “An extra man on the inside might be needed if there’s a problem with Falcon.”

Natasha shoots Bucky and Steve with a winning smile, and says over the coms, “Widow en route to location.” To Bucky and Steve she says, “No shenanigans, you two.”

Bucky smiles and waves.

It’s not long before there is a problem.

“You need to leave, now,” says, no, shouts, Wayland. “Get out of here, Adam, or I’m calling security.”

“Why bring security in?” Sam asks. “I could – ”

The line goes dead right after a crackling sound that has Bucky wincing, the sound too familiar to whenever they’d get catch electrical wires with the repair tools on his arm.

“Widow,” says Steve, “Nat.” He turns to Bucky. “I’m getting nothing.”

“Natasha,” says Bucky, “Natasha, come in.”

There’s no response, and Bucky’s only hope is that Natasha’s fine and just keeping quiet. Any alternatives can’t be thought of right now. It’s too daunting.

“Thor,” comes Coulson. “I need you to be back up for Rogers and Barnes. Don’t go in yet – stay behind.”

“I understand, Son of Coul,” repeats Thor.

“Cap, Barnes,” says Coulson, “we can’t afford to lose two good agents in there, but I think we can prevent that with supersoldiers on our side, yeah?” There’s a pause. “Get in there. Careful not to blow your covers. We need you to hold onto them as long as possible, just in case this take down fails."

Steve sighs. “On it.”

* * *

They dart in, and it goes to shit almost immediately. Bucky’s gone in through a front window, but Steve’s crawling through a door he’s not actually supposed to know is there, a door that opens up into the dressing rooms, when Wayland and Sam, both looking a bit worse for wear, stumble out. It looks like it broke out into a fight, Sam fighting defensively while Wayland moves to strike again, but the slight noise Steve makes as his shield clonks against the wall distracts her.

Steve has a split second to think, then gives up, stands, and says, “Surprise!”

Wayland looks so bewildered that Sam’s able to shake her grip.

“What the fuck does that mean?!” she exclaims. “The freaking place is closed for the day, Christopher. Get out,” she shoves Sam toward him, “and take your friend.”

“We, um, but we have a new thing for you,” says Steve. “Superheroes. Good, right?”

Wayland stares him down, and it’s suddenly apparent to Steve just how little he looked like anyone of authority as he literally crawled in through a back door in an outfit that only looks minutely like Captain America’s. “Who are you supposed to be?” she asks. “Venom?”

Steve fights back the urge to be insulted, because, hello, this costume looks NOTHING like Venom’s, and, clearly, Wayland’s an idiot. “I’m Captain America!” he says. “See? Stripes.” He gestures to his stomach. “Right there.”

“There’s no stars,” Wayland says. “That’s the shittest costume I’ve ever seen.”

Steve could swear he hears Coulson let out a little whimper of heartbreak when Wayland said that.

“But,” says Steve, “it still comes off as Captain America, right?”

Wayland stares him down for a minute, just long enough for Sam to slip away and dart toward the door that everyone in the room knows is housing a bunch of women ready to be carted off, and Steve feels something not unlike ice spread across his body as realization dawns on Wayland’s face.

“No,” she says. “No, I…” She trails off, then, quicker than anything Steve’s seen from a nonenhanced human, draws a knife and throws it at him. He hasn’t got the time to move.

That’s when it seems Wayland’s thrown herself at him, knocking him to the ground.

“What the fuck?!” she shouts, and she flies off of him like someone pushed her.

“Hey,” says Bucky from where he’s got Wayland pinned to the floor. “Seventy years later and I still can’t leave you alone for more than five minutes, can I?”

That’s when Thor literally soars through the wall, shoulder first, with a young woman in his arms. “The young maiden is injured,” he says seriously. “I was unaware of the rage I would feel when I would enter this place, but you might find some guards with severe injuries. No victims other than she,” he gestures with his chin to the woman in his arms, “are harmed.” Hill comes in with a handful of SHIELD agents Steve recognizes from medical, and Thor gently lays the girl on the gurney, brushing hair from her forehead and saying, “You will be alright, brave one.”

She makes a distracted, pleased little sigh, and says, “Thanks, Thor. You’re hotter in person.”

“I feel no temperature change,” Thor replies, but Steve hasn’t got the time to explain.

“Who’s in there with them?” Steve shouts, and goes to dart into the room. Thor stops him with a hand to his chest.

“I appreciate your effort, but I cannot let you go in there. Have you seen our Captain Rogers, lumberjack? We – ”

He’s interrupted by Bucky yelling, “I told you so!” Steve looks over to him, and he’s got Wayland on her knees, cuffing her, but Bucky’s eyes are right on Steve. “I told you it was lumberjack.”

“Everyone saw it as lumberjack,” snaps Wayland. “Jesus Christ, I can’t believe I got jumped by a fucking Avenger.”

Steve knows she meant it as an insult, but Bucky, as inappropriate for a situation as the expression is, lights up. Steve knows that look. Steve loves that look. That’s Bucky’s ‘I feel validated’ look “Well thanks for that, Wayland,” Bucky says. “Or, should I say, Willow Danberg. Got a lot of plastic surgery to hide that famous face, didn’t you?”

“Shut the fuck up,” she growls, but more professional SHIELD agents come in and give her the Miranda rights, so Steve helps Bucky up as they rush in to help the rest of the Avengers with the women kept in the room.

When they walk in Natasha has a young girl who can’t be more than eighteen in her arms, murmuring something soft and careful to her. The moment sends something through Steve’s heart – Natasha’s understanding, the hard comprehension in her eyes. She’s been through this herself, and that kills him. He knows Natasha can take him out in seconds, before he could even blink, but Steve feels an odd kind of protection for her. Probably has something to do with how much she reminds him of Bucky. Brave but broken, powerful but unsure of who they are.

Natasha’s one of the best people Steve knows, and he’s pretty sure she doesn’t see herself like that. But the way she’s holding the girl’s hand in hers, the way she’s offering small smiles in a room full of dread – that’s the Natasha that she can never see in herself.

The women in here obviously haven’t had a good time of this, but it seems like the room wasn’t as horrible as conditions Steve had imagined, and most of them have been brought outside. He catches the eyes of a few women, nodding to them as they leave. At least one’s jaw drops to the floor, and another sends him a grateful smile Steve’s not sure he’s earned.

Through the exit Steve sees too many people to count, comforting or calling loved ones or helping out, and it’s nice to feel like he helped out people more than destroyed their homes for the greater good.

The mission isn’t over yet – there will be interrogations done by people who aren’t him or Bucky to find the people who came up with the program, further interrogations to determine what women have already been harmed and how to bring them in to restore their minds without triggering their weaponized programming.

But for now, Steve feels like he did something right. He feels like they did good this time.

“Hey,” comes Bucky’s voice. His hand rests on Steve’s shoulder. “You doing okay?”

Steve nods. “Yeah,” he says, watching a little girl catapult herself into a thirty-something woman’s arms yelling, “Mommy!” “Yeah, Buck. I’m doing okay.”

* * *

The amount of paperwork Natasha, Steve, Sam, and Bucky have to fill out when everything’s said and done and Bucky has already been startled by a young woman throwing her arms around him and saying thank you (he’s still not used to people not wanting to kill him. It’s weird to not have people threatening him.) is fucking ridiculous. Nobody else had even helped out with the mission, and Thor’s inability to answer most of the questions in fewer than eight hundred words meant his reviews were generally oral and documented by some severely unlucky and underpaid low level SHIELD employee.

“There’s a question on page eighteen asking us if we had to use our sexual means to get information,” groans Natasha. “I blame you, Steve, for that time when you decided you’d attempt to seduce the villain in order to get an answer, and failed miserably.”

“Okay, first off,” says Bucky, “how the hell are you on page eighteen already? Second, when did that happen, Steve-O?”

Steve rolls his eyes. “It was before you were back. Before the Lumerian Star, actually.”

“Yeah,” snorts Natasha, “Steve hit on the lady and she ended up, not only being gay, but not even our mark.” She sighs, and Bucky would do anything to be able to watch the film reel of memories going on in Natasha’s mind right now. “It was amusing.”

Steve frowns. “But it could have worked!”

“But it didn’t,” Natasha responds. “And then I got all honeypot with the actual villain, who was an absolute train wreck of emotions and started crying before any clothing came off.”

“I feel like that might actually be your fault on page eighteen then,” says Steve.

“Again, how do you three get anything done?” Sam asks. “Seriously, it’s like you just banter until the day’s over and call it hard work.”

“Sometimes we tackle evil strip club owners,” adds Bucky with a shrug, and Steve nods emphatically.

“This,” says Sam, “is why I can’t hang out with any of you as much as I do. Well,” he looks over at Natasha, who gives him a little side grin, “I can tolerate Natasha.”

“Hey!” exclaims Steve. “I got you into this little ragtag band of idiots.”

“Yes,” says Sam, “but you’ve never given me sparring lessons or taken the time to make inappropriate Avengers baseball cards involving each one’s powers, weaknesses, and sexual embarrassments for me, so you lose out to Natasha and Clint.”

Steve’s pouting now, and Bucky’s trying not to kiss it away, because they’re at work and Steve deserves to pout a little bit. It looks like he’s about to retaliate, probably something involving how he never knew Sam liked baseball cards, but just then the door swings open and Hill walks in.

“Congratulations, you four,” she says with a small smile. “I’m impressed. The amount of damage done on this mission extends only to the building. Nobody was hurt, and Danberg’s goons managed to spill an outrageous amount of information before we were able to even start the questioning.” A funny look appears in her eyes, something between amusement and vindication. “It’s interesting what people will admit to if they think they’ll get a plea bargain out of the deal.”

“Does that mean we’re done with the paperwork?” Bucky asks, sounding a little too eager even to his own ears.

“No, Buck,” says Steve. “We’ll never be done with the paperwork.”

Never lasts much less time when you’ve got a team of superheroes to entertain you with their answers, and they’ve completed everything by the time dinner hits, so they swing over to Avengers tower for a sort of victory party.

Bucky and Tony (who, as usual, dons one of his suits, because he’s an idiot when it comes to big parties) have a metal-arm-off involving unscrewing the lid of a pickle jar, arm wrestling, and plate balancing, which ends with Tony covered in pickle juice and a table split in half. Bucky may have dropped a total of seven plates in the end, but he’s not the one smelling like a sandwich.

There’s alcohol involved – enough that Sam gets Clint to start breaking it down on the dance floor and the two of them challenge each other to a dance off. Sam wins exclusively by his stripper moves, and, from the corner of his eye, he sees Natasha fan herself a little.

“I knew you were into it,” he says, sliding up next to her.

“Shut up, Barnes,” she says, but she’s still smiling and her eyes haven’t left Sam’s.

“Go for it,” he says. “Come on, take the leap. Make the jump. Whatever metaphor’s popular right now.”

Natasha looks at him. “You know I don’t date coworkers.”

He smirks, his mind going to some very interesting memories that just meeting Natasha when he lost most of the programming brought back. “Yeah,” he replies, “but that was then. This is now.” To make his point, Bucky looks over to where Tony’s started twerking in the Iron Man suit, Pepper’s laughing into Bruce’s shoulder, and Steve’s head is in his hand as he laughs so hard he shakes the couch. “Things change, Natalia.”

She starts a bit at the old name, and he only uses it when he’s making a point. “I’m not Natalia anymore,” she says automatically.

“Then maybe it’s time for Natasha to stop using Natalia’s rules,” he says quietly, and then she’s studying his face so thoroughly he’s a little worried she could predict his next move in a game of chess he hasn’t even started playing yet.

“I’ll keep it in mind, James,” she says. “But you used to have the same policy.”

“Did I keep up with it?” Bucky asks. “And I’m still not clear how much of that was me and how much was the Winter Soldier, but I’m not sure those were my rules.”

She laughs, her head tipping back, the blonde she’d dyed it for the mission falling out of her messy ponytail. “I didn’t think you would have followed those rules after you came back to him, either way.”

The conversation stops, the two of them taking in the atmosphere in a way Bucky can’t do with anyone but Natasha. The shared, fragmented history they’ve shared over the years and now in the present isn’t what normal people would call healthy. Nothing about fucking under assumed identities then beating the shit out of each other while sparring could ever be considered healthy.

But Bucky thinks maybe, just maybe, he can have a bit of normal again.

It’s a good feeling.

“I know you’re staring at Steve,” says Natasha, a little sing song. “Tell you what. You go kiss Steve in front of everybody here and I’ll ask Sam to dance.”

Bucky’s eyebrows shoot up. “You sure about that one?” he asks. “Because this is a tough bargain to –” He pauses. “You just want to see if we can recreate Tony’s reaction to finding us in bed together, don’t you.”

Natasha shrugs. “Perhaps.”

Bucky considers it for a moment. “Then get your phone out and get it trained on Iron Man’s face, Widow.” He smirks at her. “And prepare to dance.”

Bucky stands and strides over to where Steve’s sitting, loose and happy as he watches Sam teaching Bruce the Dougie, and throws himself right into Steve’s lap. The expression on Steve’s face is surprised, but not in a bad way, and Bucky kisses him, open mouthed and a little too hot for the situation, but the way Steve’s arms wrap around Bucky to slide one hair into his hair makes Bucky think that, perhaps, Steve just doesn’t care.

It lasts for a while, and then Bucky hears a bit of a clinking noise from the corner, and looks up to see Tony, whose entire Iron Man costume fell off. He’s standing in a pair of Tweety Bird pajama pants and a neon green shirt that reads, “BOSTON BITCH” on it. It’s a sight Bucky never thought he would see in his life, but that doesn’t make it any less amazing.

“I didn’t expect that,” says Natasha, her phone still trained on him. “Can I put this on Youtube, Stark?”

“I thought you two were just fucking with me the other day!” Tony squeaks.

“Yep,” says Steve. “That last part, especially. Put it on Youtube.”

It gets two million hits in four hours.

* * *

The party winds down quickly – Tony gets himself together and gets to the point of laughing about it, and Pepper congratulates Bucky and Steve for figuring it out sooner rather than later.

Clint, on the other hand, takes to making kissy noises whenever the two of them are even a little bit close. Then Sam joins in. Then Natasha.

Thor, on the other hand, will not stop calling Steve “Captain Lumberjack,” mainly because it makes Bucky and Sam laugh so hard and Thor likes it when they laugh.

Steve and Bucky meander back to their apartment, letting hands drift around and touch and hold.

“We did it,” says Steve when they stumble into the apartment. “We are victorious.”

“When you talk like that,” says Bucky, kicking his shoes off somewhere else, “you sound like Thor. And that’s a weird experience, because your voice turns me on, but when you sound like him, I get confused.”

Steve stares at him. “My voice turns you on?”

“Shut up, lumberjack.” Steve glares at Bucky as he grins, and Bucky can’t help but love the way that the glare transforms easily into a smile.

“Now you sound like Thor.”

“Are we both secretly Thor?” Bucky asks, pretending to lose focus. “Alas! I am the god of the Northern Realms and I shall enlist the help of all Avengers to save Midgard.”

Steve chuckles, then catches himself. “Don’t do that.”

“You started it when you said we’re victorious,” says Bucky. “It’s all your fault.”

“I was trying to go back to when I called it victory sex early today,” Steve says, and he looks so strangely sad that Bucky can’t help but sigh.

“Then call it victory sex and give me beard burn again,” says Bucky, and the look on Steve’s face as his hand slips and he half falls on the ground when Bucky says it is worth any problems they’ll ever have.

“I gave you beard burn?” Steve asks. “What?”

“It happens,” says Bucky, pressing himself against Steve, trying to change the mood into something more akin to victory sex, “when somebody with a big lumberjack-y beard blows another person,” Bucky’s lips go to Steve’s ear, “and it leaves red marks all over his thighs.”

Steve coughs a little bit, and his hands go to Steve’s waist. “Really,” he says, and it’s clear his intention is to sound casual, but Bucky can hear something deep and husky and a little desperate in his tone.

“Yeah,” says Bucky. “I’ve spent the past few days with it all over. I can’t walk without remembering –” He’s intending to say everything in explicit detail, but Steve’s kissing him hot and hard and it’s stunning and, fuck, Bucky can’t even think, doesn’t want to do anything but fall into this moment.

He likes it when Steve gets like this, even more when Steve slides his hand up Bucky’s shirt and pulls it off in one fluid movement, breaking the kiss for a split second then going right back.

He turns Bucky so he’s pressed up against the kitchen sink and works at his neck with his lips, little, sucking, bites that have Bucky whining and biting his lips.

“You’re so fucking beautiful,” says Steve in Bucky’s ear and, fuck, swearing Steve is the hottest thing, and Bucky’s gasping, and Steve’s hands are at Bucky’s belt, and, oh god, oh god.

“Please,” Bucky manages, and that’s when Steve slides down Bucky’s body slowly, kissing his way down, and the difference between his lips and that stupid beard is basically setting Bucky on fire.

Steve doesn’t waste time – he slides Bucky’s pants and boxers down and licks Bucky’s cock slowly, starting at the base and working his way up to the head. Bucky reaches back, one hand gripping the sink and the other the faucet, trying to hold on and not lose his mine.

“Steve,” he gasps, “fuck, Steve.”

Steve takes Bucky in his mouth, swallows him down, and Bucky sees stars. What he really wants to see is Steve, so he looks down, and those eyes are staring back up at him, some sort of silent version of Steve’s snarky comments, and Bucky figures a, “Shut up,” is in order, despite the fact that he’s not talking at all.

So he tries it, but it comes out as, “Shut – oh, please, Steve,” because Bucky’s an idiot when he comes to Steve, and Steve’s started to press Bucky’s hips against the counter with those big hands of his, and Bucky, basically, can’t speak.

Steve’s expression hasn’t changed, and it’s quite impressive, because even with a cock in his mouth Steve can look like the most annoyingly snarky jerk Bucky’s ever seen.

Bucky can feel it coming, knows it’s about to happen, so he gasps Steve’s name and tells him. Steve speeds up, does something extra and new with his tongue and, boom, there it goes.

He hears something crunch under his metal hand, feels something crunch under his flesh hand, and half slides down the counter as Steve finishes up. Steve holds him up and kisses his way back up Bucky’s body.

Bucky can already feel more beard burn, and keeps himself from reaching down and touching at it.

“You broke the sink,” says Steve casually, kissing along Bucky’s forehead.

“Hmm?” Bucky asks, more of a little noise than an actual question. “Did what?”

“The sink,” says Steve, his tone light and a little playful, “it’s broken.” He pauses from kissing to look over Bucky’s shoulder. “Very broken, actually.”

Bucky turns. It looks like he crushed the metal faucet in places with his metal hand, and crunched some spots in the counter and sink with his flesh hand. “Huh,” he says.

Steve grins at him. “Tony’s gonna kill us.”

“Yeah,” says Bucky slowly, “but now I’m kind of curious to see if I can get you to break the bathroom sink.”

Steve looks horrified. “We can’t break another sink!” he says. “We need at least one place to wash our hands.” His expression turns a little dirty and a lot interesting. “But we can always try to break my bed.”

Bucky’s never been one to avoid challenge, so that’s his goal that night.

The headboard’s down for the count in fifteen minutes, the frame in forty, and, in one interesting scenario involving a pillow, an idea of Steve’s that had to do with jumping on the bed and making out, and Bucky’s inability to keep away from Steve’s cock, the lamp’s out in two hours.

* * *

“You haven’t shaved the beard yet,” Bucky muses the next morning, still feeling that lovely little afterglow and a little bit of beard burn…Well, it’s a bit all over his body, and he likes that. A lot. He touches his fingertips along his collarbone, beard burn mixed with hickeys and red spots. They spark something low in Bucky’s belly.

They ended up moving into Bucky’s room that night, Steve’s bed being destroyed and all, and it was different, but good. They didn’t get much sleep, either, because the change in venue meant new places to do new things.

“You seemed to like it well enough last night,” says Steve and, damn. Managed it without a blush.

Then again, he did a lot of things the night before without a blush.

Oh, fuck, Bucky’s thinking about it again. “Maybe I did,” replies Bucky, mentally hitting himself for having a comeback the caliber of a ten year old’s, “Or maybe I’m in agony because your stupid beard chafed up my thighs. Do you understand how awful this is?”

Steve laughs, almost a growl, and the sound goes right to Bucky’s cock and, well, there goes that five extra minutes he took in the shower trying to keep himself under control. “You said you liked it yesterday, so don’t go complaining.”

“Yeah, well,” says Bucky, running fingertips up and down Steve’s sides, “this time it’s double beard burn. It’s a serious inconvenience, you know.”

“Says the guy who got his eyeliner all over my pillow and my sheets and your pillow last night.”

For some reason, that’s the thing that gets Bucky’s heart and not his cock all aflutter. They’d shared beds before, sure, but not since the war and not since Bucky’s been back and himself again. And never naked and curled around each other. Not like last night, or the night before. These are new experiences, and ones he’d like to continue. He especially liked curling around Steve in his own bed. That was nice.

Steve was insistent on Bucky having his own place. Bucky’s now pretty sure his place is on the pillow next to Steve.

“Oh, screw it,” says Bucky, “banter’s fun and all but get that stupid lumberjacky face over here.”

“I’m not a lumber –”

Bucky cuts him off with a kiss, making it hot and dirty as possible, and it works, because Steve’s arms wrap around him and pull him close, chest to chest and, oh, wow, Bucky will never get used to the feel of Steve pressed up against him like this.

He sighs a little at it. It’s somehow new and familiar at the same time, something overwhelmingly like home mixed with something that feels like the first sunrise, and the thing makes Bucky pull Steve backward and toward his bed. They’re supersoldiers. They can handle another round or twelve before breakfast.

“Again, really?” laughs Steve against Bucky’s lips and, yeah, that’s on the list of best things Bucky’s ever experienced. “God, apparently rockstars are sex addicts.”

“Shut up and take me to bed, lumberjack.”

He says it just to make Steve make that goofy face, with a grin and a smirk and, god, Steve’s eyes are glued to Bucky’s lips.

“Stop calling me lumberjack,” Steve mumbles against Bucky’s jaw and then, suddenly, his legs are lifted around Steve’s waist and their cocks are pressed against each other and Steve’s throwing him down on Bucky’s bed, which might not last the morning, judging by the night before.

“You’re going to have to make me stop calling you that,” says Bucky, sure to put a little challenge in his voice, an utter dare that Steve should try to shut Bucky up, “Lumberjack.”

“Quit it!” laughs Steve.

Bucky, in a move old as history, whispers, “Make me.”

It works.


End file.
